Bombs away Sunday 13th December 2009

That's right boys and girls, the sourcecode for Boxer 1.0 alpha is now available on Bitbucket. There's also a ready-to-roll universal binary too, if you're squeamish about building stuff yourself. Check out the previous blog post for an idea of what's new in Boxer 1.0.

What you will need:

• OS X 10.5 or 10.6, and XCode >=3.0 for opening and compiling the soucecode. Intel and PowerPC are both supported. Boxer 1.0α will not compile or run on OS X 10.4 and below. Update: The 10.5 crashery is all hopefully licked now, so give the latest alpha version a go.

How to build it:

• Download and extract the latest sourcecode from Bitbucket.
• Browse to Frameworks/BGHUDAppKit.framework/Resources and doubleclick on BGHUDAppKitPlugin.ibplugin. This is only needed once, and registers this plugin with Interface Builder so it can compile XIB files that use it.
• Open the Boxer XCode project and marvel at all the beautiful code.
• Switch XCode to Release mode, and click the Build (or Build and Run) button to get your very own working binary of Boxer 1.0!

How to run it:

• Doubleclick on Boxer to start it up, or on one of your fine collection of gameboxes to open that directly. If you have Boxer 0.8x, you may have a hard time convincing OS X to launch Boxer 1.0 when you doubleclick on a gamebox or DOS executable. I find it's easiest to just drag all older versions of Boxer to the Trash, where they belong.
• Unlike previous versions, Boxer 1.0α won't display your DOS Games folder then just quit: it stays open like a proper Mac app should. You can start new DOS sessions or open gameboxes and programs from the File menu. There will eventually be a splash screen from which you can browse your games, install a new game or start a new DOS session.
• At the moment you can only have one DOS session open at a time, and Boxer will quit altogether after a session is closed. This is currently necessary for ugly internal reasons, and will be fixed sooner or later.

Caveats:

• This version will not autoupdate yet, so check the project page regularly for new versions.
• This is an alpha version. There are lots of bugs and lots of broken stuff.
• If you find bugs or broken stuff, tell me about them. Chances are I know already, but there's a lot of stuff I haven't tested much that you might find.
• This is not an all-singing, all-dancing replacement for Boxer 0.8x. Significant core functionality is still missing or incomplete. Specifically, Boxer 1.0α cannot yet create new gameboxes or autodetect game configurations, so you will need to install games first through Boxer 0.8x. Boxer 1.0α will happily play your existing preconfigured gameboxes just fine though.
• If you speak Cocoa, please (pretty please) check out the sourcecode and think about pitching in to help. I'm still very new to Cocoa and to desktop application development in general: there's heaps of room to improve Boxer's code (and teach me how to be a better coder in the process.)

As always, give it a try and tell me what you think in the comments!

• Filed under Betas, Development