Boxer

Developer diary: plans and progress reports.

Merry Christmas released Wednesday 24th December 2008

Because I love you, Boxer 0.85 is now available. Yes, this was called Boxer 0.81, but then I skipped a few versions out of vanity; there were so many improvements that a teeny 0.01 bump felt terribly meagre. Full release notes are here, but in brief this version is prettier, smarter and (I hope) more reliable in every respect. The new version will also be rolled out by automatic update in the next couple of days, once all you early adopters have stubbed your toes on it.

This release was made possible by me managing to install a copy of OS X 10.4 to a USB stick, so I could finally do proper testing. It’s amazing what you can do with these computer things these days.

Have a merry non-denominational holiday everyone, and please don’t give me any bug reports for christmas.

Edit: concerned about the linear relationship between Boxer’s girth and my hosting bill, I’ve trimmed the 0.85 download to a svelte 16.6 MB from 19.2 MB. This was done by optimising icons and removing unused emulation files from the Gravis Ultrasound drivers. If you have already downloaded 0.85, don’t bother doing it again; there have been no changes in functionality.

Commentary

  1. Sadly, I have to give you a bug report for Christmas. Boxer 0.85 utterly and completely breaks the full version of XCOM: UFO Defense (oddly, the demo included works just fine). I'll try to see if the problem is on my end (since its left over from a previous version of Boxer); I'm hoping it is.

    ascagnel Thursday 25th December 2008

  2. Hi it's me, Jef you know me from the mail about building DOSBox and the Dutch localisation, If you've managed to get G3 support, did you use rhoenie/Marcus Herbert their build ? (just curious)

    Jef Friday 26th December 2008

  3. I'm still trying to get to the bottom of the X-COM problem, but it seems to be specific to that installation, and other installations of X-COM are working fine with 0.85.

    And yup, I integrated rhoenie's G3 binary with his official DOSBox build (which had binaries for G4, G5 and Intel). Alas, DOSBox's performance on G3s is by all accounts awful... the only reason I put it in was to stop Boxer crashing with no error message on old PPCs, so that I wouldn't have to field support requests about it. Selfish me.

    Alun Bestor Saturday 27th December 2008

  4. I would do just the same Alun... I'm still trying to get a static SDL (and if I can make that, trying to build UB).

    I know you're going to explain it but I'm curious (again), if you make a localization, is it done with TextEdit or with some OS X tool ?

    Jef Saturday 27th December 2008

  5. Most (and in Boxer’s case, all) localised strings are stored in plaintext files inside an application. If you view the contents of an application package and go to Contents/Resources/, you'll see a bunch of folders named e.g. English.lproj, French.lproj etc. These contain localised files: string files, localised images and interface nibs. The string files (named e.g. Localizable.strings) can be edited in TextEdit, XCode or any plaintext editor, and their format is pretty self-evident.

    OS X's elegant approach to localisation means that it's frequently possible for you to localise applications yourself without modifying the application code: just duplicate the English localisation folder inside an application, rename the folder to the name of your language, and translate the files.

    Alun Bestor Sunday 28th December 2008

  6. Reliving my childhood games... this definitely made my X-mas! Thanks!!! :D

    Brion Sunday 28th December 2008

  7. I dunno if it's just me or my laptop but Master of Magic has become unbearably slow. I normally play on a 2.8 Dual Core 2 iMac at around 50000 CPU cycles. The iMac though needed to be taken into the shop for repairs the other day so I decided to put the new version .85 on my 2.2 Ghz Dual Core Macbook Pro(I was using .8 on the iMac). I didn't think 600Mhz would make a huge difference given that it's still a strong CPU, but it's the slowest I've ever seen it, even if I ramp the CPU to 70000. Nothing seems to do the trick. Master of Magic typically gets slow no matter what toward the end game but I've never seen it this bad.

    grannysmith Sunday 28th December 2008

  8. That's a bit of a concern - my development machine is a 2.2ghz macbook and there's very few games it can't handle. Bear in mind that increasing emulated CPU cycles beyond what the CPU can keep up with will actually slow things down: you're probably better off lowering them again to around 30000, or switching it to max in the config file, which regulates the speed to what your CPU can handle. The emulation is very CPU-intensive so it is affected also by what other processes are doing (e.g. time machine backups, Growl notifications).

    You could always download Boxer 0.8 again from the release notes page to see if you get better speed, though nothing has changed in 0.85 that should affect this.

    Alun Bestor Sunday 28th December 2008

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