Boxer

Developer diary: plans and progress reports.

Good news everyone Friday 27th February 2009

Download the Boxer 0.9 beta

The new beta of Boxer 0.9 is available here as a 10.5-only universal binary. This release incorporates the features I’ve been showing off over the past few weeks, along with a few (hopefully pleasant) surprises.

I won’t be crying every beta from the rooftops this way, but this is a significant one and I need as much testing coverage as I can get. Not only is Boxer getting its tendrils deep into DOSBox itself, like some malevolent squid, but the entire DOSBox and SDL build process has been moved from grotty old makefiles to a nice tidy universal-compiling XCode project. Needless to say all this upheaval means I may have introduced new bugs or left a few babies in all the bathwater, and I’ll need your help tracking them down (especially you PowerPC users.)

A note on all this XCode business: moving to an XCode project makes no difference to Johnny End-User, but it opens the door for other Mac developers to make their mark on the Boxer/DOSBox codebase. Building a custom version of Boxer is now literally a one-click operation, rather than the humiliating error-prone ordeal that is the DOSBox build process on OS X. I’ll be releasing the sourcecode once I’ve tidied up a little, and look forward then to moving to a versioning system to which others can contribute.

Commentary

  1. Haha, didn't noticed that that was the about box :)

    Uhm, didn't you forgot the localizations ?

    Thanks for your reply about the screenshots. But command shift 4 lets me make a selection not the window but nevermind, I'll look into it.

    Jef Friday 27th February 2009

  2. I have SimCity2000 sound set to Roland MT-32. Did you inc. Coremidi? Maybe its just me, or is the sound worse than 0.85?

    lex Friday 27th February 2009

  3. CoreMIDI is included and has been confirmed to work, but it doesn't emulate an MT-32 - it only allows a passthrough to a real MT-32 device. Could you let me know your system (PowerPC or Intel) and describe the sound problems with some specific examples so I can check them?

    Alun Bestor Friday 27th February 2009

  4. Jef: the localizations have been removed from the beta builds because there have been so many text changes, and I didn't want to worry about inconsistent strings while I was still deciding what each item is called. They'll need to be relocalized in one go before release, once the final strings are decided.

    (Also command-shift-4 will take a selection unless you press the spacebar, at which point it switches to capturing entire windows.)

    Alun Bestor Friday 27th February 2009

  5. Um, this is not a hint of leaving 'The Striped'10.4 for 'The Spotty'-only 10.5, surely?

    SwBear Sunday 1st March 2009

  6. Alas it will be for the current version—the new Objective-C and Cocoa features introduced in 10.5 have made development a whole lot quicker and easier, which is essential given I’m learning Cocoa as I go, otherwise it would have been months before anything saw the light of day.

    So Boxer 0.9 will probably be a 10.5-only release, but I hope to backport most of the features to 10.4 once my code is more mature. There will probably be a maintenance release of Boxer 0.85 for 10.4 before then at least, to add CD audio support and fix some bugs.

    Alun Bestor Sunday 1st March 2009

  7. Runs flawlessly on 10.5.6, screen live-resizing, speed emulation config and mouse locking are killer addons that the wonderful Boxer app was lacking. Thanks a lot for your hard work and effort Alun !!

    chivotario Friday 6th March 2009

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