Boxer

Developer diary: plans and progress reports.

Fixing the foundations, ironing the drapes Sunday 2nd August 2009

As further proof that I have absolutely no idea what ‘beta’ is supposed to mean, recent Boxer 0.86 betas include some fairly fundamental internal changes. Of these, two will actually be visible and relevant to you:

  1. Boxer’s “built-in” DOS utilities and Gravis Ultrasound drivers are now actually built-in: they are kept inside Boxer itself, instead of being copied into your DOS Utilities folder. This saves you about a dozen megabytes, and me a lot of heartache when the utilities need updating.

    The DOS Utilities folder still works, but is now solely for your own personal programs and not Boxer’s. You can safely delete the REQUIRED and ULTRASND folders from your existing DOS Utilities, as these are leftovers and unused by Boxer.

  2. Boxer's default DOSBox settings are now also built-in, instead of being mixed up with your own settings in ~/Library/Preferences/Boxer/DOSBox Preferences.conf. In fact, that preferences file is no longer used by the latest betas: if you have customised any settings, you should now put them in ~/Library/Preferences/Boxer/Shared Preferences.conf. This new file is solely for your own personal settings, and not Boxer’s.

The rationale behind these changes is to minimise Boxer’s reliance on files that are out there in Userland. This makes it harder for you to break Boxer’s intended behaviour (not that you would ever do such a thing) and much easier for me to push updates that don’t trample all over your personal stuff.

At the other end of the feature spectrum, the latest Boxer beta applies an ostentatious game-shelf appearance to the icon view for new DOS Games folders. Here’s how it looks:

Out of courtesy, Boxer will not apply this appearance to your existing DOS Games folder: only to new games folders it makes. If you want this appearance for your existing DOS Games folder, then the simplest way is:

  1. Drag your games folder to the Trash; (it’s safe!)
  2. Launch Boxer, and tell it to create a new games folder when it complains;
  3. Move your games from the Trash back into the new games folder.

There are other ways, but they’re complicated and hard to explain. If you don’t want to trash files, send me an email and I’ll walk you through it.

Cover Flow is still the default view for the DOS Games folder in OS X 10.5, but you can switch to the shelf appearance by choosing icon view from the Finder View menu. You will also need to adjust the folder’s View Options panel if you want it to always use this view mode.

Commentary

  1. It works under Snow Leopard !!! Without Rosetta !

    Thanks !

    Weedy Weed Smoker Sunday 2nd August 2009

  2. Well that's happy news! :) I’d been squashing a lot of 10.6 crash bugs with the help of other people’s error reports, but didn’t want to call it fixed until I’d been able to test for myself.

    Alun Bestor Sunday 2nd August 2009

  3. Hey, the shelf is awesome!

    But won't all these changes to the 0.8 codebase cause more work for the 0.9 version?

    Timo Monday 3rd August 2009

  4. Not as much as you’d think; the 0.86 build was taken from 0.9’s applescript wrapper anyway, so getting these changes working in 0.9 is just a matter of replacing the DOSBox “core” inside the applescript wrapper with Boxer’s Cocoa version. (Although since I plan to recode the rest of the application entirely in Cocoa, that’s kind of moot—it will all need to be rewritten anyway.)

    Alun Bestor Monday 3rd August 2009

  5. I dont get this work...i did exactly what told and i havent got the shelve mode....downloaded the newest beta, deleted ald boxer, replaced it with the beta, change coverflow to iconview...but the shelve is not seeable...

    Paul The Tall Tuesday 4th August 2009

  6. We've since sorted this out in email, but to clarify for others: Boxer won't put this appearance on existing game folders, only new game folders it creates. So for now you'll need to do the delete-recreate trick. (I'll think about other opt-in ways to apply this appearance - my main concerns are to not override someone's settings without asking, and to not nag about it either.)

    Alun Bestor Tuesday 4th August 2009

  7. I never thought you'd use the shelves with Boxer because of the default view behavior. (like hiding the top bar etc.)

    Also, you were talking about writing Boxer completely in cocoa. I know you're doing this since a long time but do you have any plans for writing the shelve without the Finder ? (In Boxer's interface itself) because that would be extremely hard wouldn't it ?

    Anyway, nice work on 10.6 compatibility. I'm touching in the dark when it comes to that because my PowerPC Mac can't boot 10.6...

    Jef Sunday 9th August 2009

  8. Random question.

    Can I use some of the DOSbox scaling effects to make things look better within Boxer? If so, which of the .conf files should I be editing? I've been screwing around with both the shared preferences.conf within the app and the .conf file within the game folder, but so far it's still in all its pixelated glory

    Are only certain ones supported?

    Ike Monday 10th August 2009

  9. Pity you're missing Savage Empire and Martian Dreams on the shelf there - two other really awesome games from the Ultima universe!

    Sean Tuesday 11th August 2009

  10. Jef: well, the shelf design worked out much better than I thought so I decided to go for it—and only added a few hundred kilobytes of background art ;) Anyway, the Cocoa rewrite will keep using Finder for the game browsing for now; as you supposed, it would be a lot of work just to reinvent the square wheel. I'll save it for when there's a proper advantage to having it built-in.

    Ike: I've since answered this one by email too, but the Shared Preferences.conf file that Boxer actually uses is located in your [home folder]/Library/Preferences/Boxer folder. The version you found inside Boxer is just the 'template' which Boxer copies for each user. (As a rule, you shouldn't modify files inside an OS X application anyway or Bad Things May Happen.)

    Sean: I never played the Worlds of Ultima games actually, as a kid I was too anal about only playing the 'canon' ones. Which didn't stop me from falling in love with the Ultima Underworlds admittedly.

    Alun Bestor Tuesday 11th August 2009

  11. Just discovered Boxer thanks to Bethesda's Daggerfall being released for free. I'm very impressed with Boxer, a great program which makes playing DOS games on a Mac a much more seamless experience. Quick question, is there a way to force a game to launch in full screen? I checked the DF configuration file and didn't see anything I could tweak. Thanks again for releasing such an amazing, and FREE app.

    Alex Ross Wednesday 12th August 2009

  12. Hi Alex, glad to hear you like Boxer! You can force fullscreen by editing [your home folder]/Library/Preferences/Boxer/Shared Preferences.conf, and uncommenting the "fullscreen=true" line in there. This will take effect for all games.

    (Future versions of Boxer will have a preferences window for common settings like this, instead of making you dig through configuration files!)

    Alun Bestor Wednesday 12th August 2009

  13. Thanks Alun, worked like a charm. Keep bein' an amazing Mac developer, I really appreciate it.

    Alex Ross Thursday 13th August 2009

  14. The shelf background looks great, but there are a couple of issues:

    • OS X doesn't tile background images. I've got about 120 DOS games, and it stops in the mid S's. If I stretch the window wide, it cuts off on the right side as well. I've gotten around this by tiling the image myself in Fireworks.

    • Longer titles overflow the "plaques" and kill the effect. Maybe a two-line-filename-height version would work better?

    Matthew Ratzloff Saturday 15th August 2009

  15. Hi Matthew, I'll play around with a double-height plaque as it may not be as much of an aesthetic disaster as I initially feared. The cutoff may have to remain for now however, unless I have serious luck jiggling with PNG image compression… since Finder won't tile the image itself, it becomes a tradeoff between real-estate and filesize - and the image for the 12x6 shelf is already 300k.

    Alun Bestor Saturday 15th August 2009

  16. Conclusion after hours of futile work: double-height shelves make single-height text look really stupid, and none of the tools I have can compress a pre-tiled image of that size down to the filesize of the original tile. For now I may just double the number of rows, which will double the filesize (to 600kb.)

    Alun Bestor Sunday 16th August 2009

  17. Yikes, sorry to create so much work for you! Maybe you can just make the shelf image a separate download tucked away somewhere on the site?

    Matthew Ratzloff Sunday 23rd August 2009

  18. No worries, it needed to be done anyway. The latest beta now has a shelf with 144 slots - if you run out after that, I have no sympathy for you ;) (Of course with that many games, a single folder in icon view would be a very inefficient way to browse them anyway and I would recommend using coverflow and/or subfolders anyway).

    Alun Bestor Tuesday 25th August 2009

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