Comments on “Happy New Year Everyone”

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-01-10T00:43:47+02:00

Works like a charm :) However there is now no going back from the "Zoom" option, like it used to be in some previous alpha. It stays big forever. Actually, I think there should be Cmd+Z keystroke for that one. And the same functionality could be under the green-plus window button.

I love the Preferences panel design. Great work!

I know You're working hard on disc swapping, if it is possible anyhow. Before the greatest day of all will come with it, You could add some another option tho'. I've checked, that if I know the exact moment of the game, when it's asking for the 2nd disc, I can actually swap discs using Inspector just right before it (remove 1st, add 2nd with the same drive letter). And so there could be an option to "virtually" mount two or more discs into one letter (using "D CD_LABEL" prefix), but with 1st enabled and the following ones greyed out in Inspector. Then it'd be possible to swap it with one click there, enabling another disc, disabling the current. Or maybe the same thing could be done with a "Swap disc" keystroke? Of course the problem with swapping after prompt remains, but this one could help in some way and would save a lot time of searching the 2nd disc on HDD :D

Anyway, awesome job! Boxer is insanely simple, astonishingly designed and flawlessly working :D

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-01-10T01:19:52+02:00

Almost forgot - Happy New Year, Alun!

To not let this comment be a little bit "spammy" and off-topic, I'll say also - Sparkle framework is great. Thank You very much for adding the auto-update feature!

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-01-10T16:30:57+02:00

Thanks for the best wishes :)

Regarding disc swapping: this is already working correctly with physical CDs, however I am planning to support disc 'stacks' for ISOs and folders too, which will let you cycle a single drive between two or more source images/folders, using an interface much like what you describe.

I've created a tracking proposal detailing this feature in the Boxer issues database, if you'd like to follow its progress or contribute comments.

However, there's a lot of boring fiddly groundwork to be done before this feature can be implemented, so I've been painting pictures of TVs instead.

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-01-10T16:37:28+02:00

Regarding the Zoom button, this still toggles correctly back and forth for me, but it may be broken under some circumstances in a recent alpha. Are you running OS X 10.5 or 10.6?

I've eschewed a keyboard shortcut for Zoom for now, because all the Apple apps seem to do so; Cmd-Z specifically is reserved for Undo, which will eventually undo drive-unmounting in Boxer (among other things).

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-01-10T21:58:21+02:00

Oh, I forgot about Undo, sorry. You're right - no Cmd+Z. However, if not needed for some other things, You could consider the QuickTime-like Cmd+ and Cmd- keystrokes for window resizing. But it's actually not that important.

Anyway, here's the deal with my Zoom behaviour: I'm running 10.6.2 on early '09 MBP 17" with 1920x1200 res. When I launch the game for the 1st time, it goes native - 640x480 usually, so I'll use it as an example. Then, when I click Zoom, it doubles: 1280x960. After unzoom however, it becomes 1067x800. From this moment I can only switch between the larger two, BUT if I'll drag Boxer's window while 1067, Zoom stops working. After relaunch, it's still 1067 with Zoom working again, but it'll never return to native :(

There is no window size data in DOSBox Preferences.conf file, so this must be stored somewhere outside gamebox, I guess.

I should write it in Boxer's issues database, shouldn't I?

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-01-12T20:18:40+02:00

Please do post an issue about this! At the moment the zoom behaviour (even when it works) is unreliable and obscure, and more use-cases and examples of where it falls down will help me plan how to make it work properly.

For what it's worth: window sizes are stored in net.washboardabs.boxer.plist in your Library/Preferences folder, in the same fashion as all Cocoa app preferences get persisted. So if you ever want/need to blitz Boxer's settings, delete this file and your preferences will reset to the defaults.

(In time, all user-specific settings will be persisted in this way instead of inside the gamebox, so that you can share a game with others without your own personal preferences or Mac-specific settings coming along for the ride.)

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-01-18T11:30:02+02:00

Boxer rocks! Keep up the good work :)

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-01-28T20:40:52+02:00

Great work, but how get i my bookshelves back in this version. Have reinstalled macosx and i cant get the bookshelves back as in earlier versions.

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-01-29T00:03:46+02:00

1.0alpha doesn't yet create game folders I'm afraid, so you'll need to put 0.88 back on and launch it to get one. That feature will be coming back into the 1.0 branch at the same time as game installation, but currently the alphas are not a drop-in replacement for 0.8x.

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-02-11T16:57:59+02:00

Is Boxer piping MIDI music through CoreAudio? I'm trying to get Monkey Island 2's music to sound like Monkey Island 2 on ScummVM using the CoreAudio driver but it's not happening.

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-02-11T19:42:59+02:00

It is using CoreAudio, so I'm not sure why it would be sounding different - it may be that ScummVM is doing something special, or that MI2 is set up in DOS with different soundcard settings than ScummVM uses. What is the difference in sound exactly?

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-02-11T22:45:24+02:00

The instrument set is completely different. I'm guessing DOSBox emulates SoundBlaster 16 and its sound font and passes that to CoreAudio instead of letting the CoreAudio MIDI soft synth for the music. I'll try to post a sound clip when I have a bit of time.

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-02-12T09:04:48+02:00

DOSBox doesn't do anything to the General MIDI patch set - it passes the MIDI signals straight through to CoreAudio. However, if the game itself is deciding to use Sound Blaster (for instance) then the sound it outputs will be Adlib/Soundblaster FM synth rather than MIDI.

Looking at a copy of MI2 I have lying around, there's no installer for configuring audio settings, and there's also no General MIDI driver - instead there's drivers for adlib, soundblaster, and Roland MT-32. My guess is that the game is auto-detecting the (emulated) sound hardware and choosing soundblaster. Getting it to explicitly use Roland won't help, because the MT-32's sound bank is incompatible with that of General MIDI and will result in very screwy audio.

So, my guess is that ScummVM is indeed doing some tomfoolery behind the scenes, giving its own General MIDI-compatible treatment to MI2's raw music data. DOSBox, on the other hand, is stuck with whatever the game's own sound drivers spit out.

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-02-21T01:40:46+02:00

I am simply stunned. I stumbled upon Boxer just poking around various Mac sites and gave it a try. I honestly never believed I would be able to play the games that I grew up on again. The wife and the kids were out of the house this week and I now have Ultima 1-9 (Ultima 9 using Parallels), Ultima Underworlds 1 and 2, Earl Weavers Baseball, Death Track, etc on my MBP. They all simply work and look better than ever sitting on my virtual book case. I can't say thanks enough for making such an awesome product. You have a fan for life.

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-02-26T16:04:07+02:00

Been using alpha 1 (20100121 version) for weeks. I have noticed that after exiting the DOS game/program, I am presented with the program-picker panel. To exit Boxer I need to Cmd-W. I think that should also be an option on the program-picker panel. Great enhancements to a spectacular programming effort!

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-02-26T18:45:14+02:00

Chip, by an option on the program picker panel, did you mean along the lines of a "Close the window after this program exits" checkbox while a game is running (along with the "always run this program" checkbox)?

The program-picker panel is already due for a redesign/rethink, because it has a number of awkward usability problems. There's a tracking ticket for this here if you're interested. One of the points not addressed by the ticket, though, is the one you've brought up; so if you like, please do elaborate in a comment on the ticket there.

My quick take on this: usually you do want the window to close itself after the game exits (though not always), and there should indeed be a way to control this. However, it might be better if that takes the form of an application-wide toggle in the preferences panel, instead of a per-game toggle: that way, you can be sure of what's going to happen when any of your games exit.

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-02-26T18:42:51+02:00

Todd, thanks for your kind words and I'm very glad to hear that Boxer has smoothed your way to happy nostalgia :) The Ultimas are my personal favourite of mine too (as you might gather from how often they appear in the screenshots around here!) and a big motivation for working on Boxer.

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-03-01T05:02:24+02:00

So far, I have loaded about 70 games of various types and have all but two of them working. About the only feature that I would simply love to have is the "Disk Stacks" option mentioned at the top of the page. Not only would this be uber-handy by swapping discs during game play, but it would also be extremely helpful in swapping discs (like virtual floppy drives if you will) for the few games that still come zipped up per floppy image.

Another nice touch would be to have the ability to "lock" the speed slider at a set position so that a random click of the mouse doesn't send the game into a speed fit.

Oh and a very minor thing - could you possibly create the bookshelf background image a bit wider for those of us that use very high resolutions (mine is 1920x1200).

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-03-01T11:22:45+02:00

Hi Todd! The speed slider will be disappearing from the statusbar in the next build, as it now has a much nicer home in the Inspector Panel and is not needed often enough to warrant cluttering up the main window (and as you've found, it's easy to click accidentally!)

Regarding the background image… my hands are a bit tied with that, as the OS X 10.6 Finder has a maximum width for background images - if the image is any larger, the background won't display at all (I believe it's related to the maximum OpenGL texture dimensions supported by the GPU). At least this was the case in 10.6.0, they may have fixed this limitation in subsequent releases. I'll check this again when I have time.

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-03-02T14:51:43+02:00

Hey Alun have you ever considered including a build of DOSBox with MT-32 emulation support? Since Boxer is so geared towards giving the best possible experience it would seem like a no-brainer to me. Also the fact that there's enough DOSBox builds with MT-32 floating around, but none for OSX...

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-03-03T09:53:39+02:00

I very much want to add this, because the MT-32 was an indelible part of my childhood Sierra gaming.

However eager I am though, it's not a simple matter of dropping the feature in: there are significant compilation and performance issues to iron out, and it needs to be integrated properly into Boxer, with an easy way to enable it per-game that doesn't involve digging through a conf file. (Ideally also a way around the copyright issues of bundling the MT-32 ROMs, as I find the thought of not bundling them intolerably awkward for users.)

Planning and implementation take time and upskilling, and my efforts are currently focused on more vital features (cough like needlessly rewriting the renderer cough), so I don't expect MT-32 emulation will make it into 1.0. However, assistance is always welcome - if someone else has the time to patch the feature in, then I would be very happy to polish it off and integrate it into the UI.

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-03-03T17:55:43+02:00

I'd be interested in tinkering trying to get MT-32 emulation into a OS build, but can you tell me what exactly you need to use it for Boxer, since I have no clue how exactly the original DOSbox is integrated into it?

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-03-03T19:03:36+02:00

Sorry to chime in with the demands, but what about CD audio support? DOSBox already supports that, right? I never quite understood why Boxer didn't.

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-03-03T21:37:59+02:00

Merrybear: actually it's the other way around, DOSBox's CD audio support is quite broken on OS X, but I've fixed the feature in the Boxer 1.0 alphas. Try it and see - if you're not getting CD audio out of the latest alpha then there may be a bug I've missed, but it should work just fine. If you can't get it working, get in touch and let me know which games aren't giving you CD audio.

Andy: download the Boxer sourcecode from here and check it out for yourself, it's probably easier to see than to explain. DOSBox is integrated into Boxer at the sourcecode level, and you'll need to get to know Boxer's XCode project in order to do any work with it, but otherwise Boxer keeps DOSBox's code mostly at arm's length, so porting the base feature from existing DOSBox implementations should be fairly straightforward.

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-03-11T04:42:57+02:00

Hmm. I tried long and hard getting the Munt library to link up properly, but I couldn't get it to work. Lack of documentation on the DOSbox side of things doesn't really help either, and I've only done this sort of thing a few times before in my life. From what I've seen on the DOSbox forums, other people had the same issue before (on OSX). Well, I'll leave it up to you Alun. ;/ Maybe you'll find the time some day to take a look. If not, well Boxer is awesome enough as is!

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-03-11T13:45:24+02:00

I'm sorta getting Boxer-alpha-withdrawal. No alpha release in almost 2 months. Alun, is there a chance that a new alpha is coming soon or is the input code rewrite still too far away for a new alpha to be release soon?

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-03-11T21:55:57+02:00

How does the CDDA support work..? I mean because Boxer's "drop games to install" thingy only takes iso files yet iso files have no support for CDDA. trying it with BIN/CUE etc wont work. I am curently trying to install Protostar this way but im really confused as to how to actually get it to play it while being able to listen to the CDDA when playing...any help?

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-03-11T22:25:34+02:00

I am suffering from a very strange thing going now. I initially had Boxer 0.8, then wanted to try Boxer 1.0a but saw it couldn't install games yet. So I reinstalled Boxer 0.8 again, purging 1.0 from my hard drive. But somehow Boxer 1.0 seems to have taken over the "Drop Games Here" container, because everytime I drop something on it, it simply starts up Boxer 1.0 - and I don't even have any clue where OSX is launching the app from because I thought I deleted it!

I tried to delete Boxer'S preferences and have it recreate them, but still the same problem. Even when it creates a completely new DOS Game folder, the dropbox icon launches Boxer 1.0 from some unknown abyss. And obviously since it doesn't sport the boxing feature yet, nothing happens. Meaning I can't install any new games.

What's going on there?

Happy New Year Everyone

2010-03-13T07:42:36+02:00

Sly: I'm actually on an unexpected family trip at the moment until the end of March, and the planning and travelling has prevented me from getting any proper work done for the last 4 weeks. Mouse input is still quite broken in the latest checkins, but I expect to have it fixed easily once I can get any time to myself to do so. Once that's done, there'll be a new build.

Gilmoregil: if you have a BIN/CUE of Protostar, then drag-drop the CUE file onto Boxer itself. This will mount drive C as your DOS Games folder, and drive D as the BIN/CUE image. You can then manually install the game from the CD image to a folder in your DOS Games folder. Once the game is finished installing, close the DOS window and drag the new folder onto the game installer droplet, to wrap it up into a gamebox of its own.

If you have a physical CD of Protostar, then you can install the game using the droplet under Boxer 0.8x, then run the game under Boxer 1.0 to get the game to play proper CD audio from the physical CD.

Sorry that you need to jump through these hoops at the moment to get CD audio - I hope to get game installation reimplemented in Boxer 1.0 very soon, which will make things much simpler.

Merrybear: when Boxer 1.0 starts up, you can find out where it is on your Mac by Cmd-clicking on its icon in the Dock, which will reveal it in a new Finder window. Once you've located it, then deleting it should revert OSX's idea of "Boxer" to your earlier copy of 0.87/0.88, which will make the game installer droplet work properly again. (Unless you have still more copies of 1.0 hiding around the place, in which case rinse and repeat!)