Now in Stereo Tuesday 29th June 2010

A new Boxer 1.0 alpha build is fresh out of the oven. Since this build has ended up focusing on UI refinement, a few gratuitous screenshots seemed in order:

Multiple sessions at once

Opening additional gameboxes or DOS windows will launch additional Boxer instances to handle them. More on this below.

A usability injection for the program-chooser panel

Besides looking cleaner, the panel now highlights the default program and bumps it to the start of the list. It also slides away after clicking the default program, instead of hanging around taking up space.

And a few more improvements

• The button now enlarges the window to fit all the available space, instead of fitting it to a multiple of the DOS resolution.
• “Optimize for newer games” can now be toggled while a program is running.
• Filtering has been improved for weird resolutions like 640×200.
• A bunch of other little things you may or may not notice.

So what are you waiting for? Go grab it already.

An aside for technically-minded people regarding multiple sessions

A limitation which has dogged Boxer 1.0 from the very beginning is DOSBox’s one-shot nature. Because DOSBox is compiled into Boxer, Boxer’s memory is DOSBox’s memory; and DOSBox stores its emulation state in a vast hive of global variables, which it doesn’t bother cleaning up afterwards.

This prevents DOSBox from handling two emulation sessions at once — because each session clobbers the other one’s state — and from starting up a second emulation session after finishing the first — because the subsequent session inherits a hopelessly polluted state from the first one. Imagine a living room the morning after a student party.

This is of no concern to a hard-living Windows transplant like DOSBox, which was designed to quit as soon as the emulation exits. But it is of concern to a well-behaved native app like Boxer, which wants to stay open in the Dock, and to be able to open and reopen as many windows as it needs, just like all its other Mac chums.

Boxer was a sad panda. Until now.

The ideal solution

Would be for Boxer to move the DOSBox emulator core to a separate child process with its own isolated memory space, and spawn instances of this emulator process for each window. This way DOSBox could shit in its own sandpit as much as it likes, it could run alongside other emulator processes without fear of cross-pollution, and it could be terminated or paused or restarted at will by the parent application (Boxer) without ruining everyone else’s day.

This was the approach that Google Chrome took for its tabs, that OpenEMU adopted for its multi-emulator cores, and that Boxer will eventually use for its DOS sessions.

However, restructuring Boxer to manage this parent-child process relationship is complex and has a lot of pitfalls. The groundwork for it is pretty far along, but it’s unlikely to be ready in time for Boxer 1.0.

So instead, the cheap and cheerful solution

Is for Boxer to simply launch more Boxers. When Boxer has a DOS window open and it gets a request to open another, it just spawns a new Boxer instance and tells that to open the window instead. If you try to open a new window after closing one, then Boxer quits and immediately relaunches to open the new window with a clean slate.

This approach has disadvantages. Each Boxer instance is a separate application as far as OS X is concerned: so they appear separately in the Dock and CmdTab switcher. Instances can’t coordinate with each other: so windows tend to open exactly over the top of existing ones, and preference changes in one don’t take effect immediately in another. This is very much a stopgap solution.

But, grubby and hackish though this is, it’s so dramatically better than before that I wanted to get it out there for people to play with right away.

• Filed under Alphas, Development