Boxer

Developer diary: plans and progress reports.

Out to lunch Monday 16th July 2012

My July has gotten a lot more crowded than I expected, and it’s become clear that Boxer 1.4 will not be ready in time for the impending release of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. So, I released Boxer 1.3.2 as a stopgap: this has a few minor bugfixes and is Developer-ID signed to be trusted by Mountain Lion's new Gatekeeper system.

I'll be very busy over the next couple of months with Real Life commitments, so Boxer’s development will be quiet for a wee while and Boxer 1.4 may not arrive until later this year. Fear not though, exciting things are on the way!

Commentary

  1. You've done so much in the past couple years for DOS emulation on the Mac that you deserve that dev break.

    Boxer is lightyears ahead of any emulators in quality and ease-of-use.

    My only request for when you're done with RL commitments is adding the Edge filter. A GSoC student is working on ScummVM shaders here: http://singron.blogspot.ca

    Sludge Vohaul Thursday 26th July 2012

  2. Sludge: the edge filter described in that blog post is CPU-based. Boxer 1.4's rendering styles are implemented as GPU shaders, which are an entirely different beast.

    For smoothing, I'm currently focusing on the xBR shader described here. I'll be weighing up other smoothing implementations too to work out the best quality-vs-performance balance, so this may change before release; but I'm not interested in shipping half a dozen slightly different smoothing algorithms. I only intend to ship one, that works well for the majority of cases and performs well on modest Mac hardware.

    One of the advantages of a shader-based implementation however is that other shader sets can be added without recompilation or messing around with a plugin architecture. So, it's entirely possible that one day Boxer will let you drag-drop user-made shaders into the rendering styles panel to add them to the range of options. This would involve extra UI work so it definitely will not appear in the initial release.

    Alun Bestor Saturday 28th July 2012

  3. Intewesting. xBR is even highquality than HQ. Disregard my Edge comment. :)

    Sludge Vohaul Saturday 28th July 2012

  4. I'm sold. Can't wait till you're done to properly see this xBR shader in action! :)

    Josh Pettus Tuesday 14th August 2012

  5. Me again with a little question concerning gamepads. Well as advertised, my ps3 wireless is working out of the box. The thing is, the mapping of the four buttons doesn't really quite fit me, and I'd like to know if it's possible to remap them (switch one with another one). I totally understand that it's not possible with the UI since you want to keep Boxer user friendly, but I was wondering if there was some kind of internal config file I could play with. I had a look in the package contents of the Boxer app, and found some files regarding joysticks (especially Simple Joystick.conf), but there are nearly empty. Is this file the right one to configure gamepads or should I dig in the Boxer source code (could you point me where?)

    Thanks! Can't wait for the shaders too :)

    ben401 Thursday 16th August 2012

  6. Hi Ben, there is no functionality (hidden or otherwise) in Boxer at the moment for remapping controls - those files you found only define gameport emulation settings for DOSBox. A controller mapping UI will be showing up in a future version, but not probably not in 1.4.

    Alun Bestor Friday 17th August 2012

  7. Ok good to know, meanwhile I can just use gamepad companion!

    ben401 Friday 17th August 2012

  8. Actually I didn't notice that you mentioned sourcecode before; if you are willing to compile your own version from source then you could indeed change Boxer's mapping for the PS3 by editing BXSixaxisControllerProfile.m. (The relevant part is the generatedBindingForButtonElement: method.)

    At some point before an actual mapping UI is ready all of these programmatically-defined layouts will be migrated to an XML definition format, which will at least make them easier to hack.

    Alun Bestor Saturday 18th August 2012

  9. Thanks for everything you've for us. Thank you very much. That's all I want to say.

    Passager0 Sunday 19th August 2012

  10. Alun, that was totally what I was looking for. I swapped the circle and square buttons, compiled the project, and now I have the mapping I had in mind! Thanks a lot for taking the time to answer the questions, I really appreciate it!

    ben401 Sunday 19th August 2012

  11. Hey, there's a lovely review on Ars Technica today — hopefully it'll send lots of people your way!

    Tom Wednesday 19th September 2012

  12. Yup, caught it earlier :) Here's the link for anyone who missed it.

    So far lots of downloads and a few new bug reports; but it seems few people find their way to the blog from the front page, which reinforces the need for a redesign of this dumb site.

    Alun Bestor Wednesday 19th September 2012

  13. Looks like we are starting to get spam...

    Josh Pettus Wednesday 3rd October 2012

  14. GoG started supporting the Mac today and they are using Boxer for their ports. For some reason they just ripped out the settings panels, any idea why? Speaking of GoG, I love how I can just drag&drop a game's folder and Boxer picks up all the DOSBox settings. Would it be possible for Boxer to import the files from the Mac ports as well? Using the files from the Windows installer always requires me to go through Wine and importing from the Mac version would remove that step.

    HiPhish Friday 19th October 2012

  15. Interesting, today on GoG they announced Mac support and some of the fellows are saying the dosbox games use Boxer or some variant thereof. I assume they went over this with you, but it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on all this. Be well!

    Zen Friday 19th October 2012

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