As if I didn’t have enough else to do I’ve started redesigning the Boxer website, with a new style that will be carried over to the User Guide and disk images also. Click the peek below for a full-page mockup:
Edit: Since the new design has blown into town already, consider this a ‘target render’ of sorts; the site will only look as good as the screenshot in Safari, Firefox 3 or some flavour thereof.
Boxer 0.81 is still waiting on a couple of significant bugs and some localisation, but in the meantime I've been making DOS itself more pleasant. 0.81 bundles a handy 3rd-party utility—the marvellous LOCATE by Charles Dye—and adds some new commands to help you get around easier in DOS.
For instance, you can now type RESTART to reset the DOS session and relaunch your game; PROGRAMS to get a list of executable programs in your current directory; and LAUNCH program-name to launch a program from anywhere, without needing to find it and change to its directory first. The IPX networking menu has also been prettified:
Alas, it seems there’s a DOSBox OpenGL renderer bug which occurs on some Macs. If your DOS window comes up black until you move it or go fullscreen, could you get in touch with me?
0.81 has, Katamari-style, agglomerated a few new features on its roll toward release.
The first of these is preliminary support for long filenames. This, alas, does not mean displaying long filenames in DOS; it just means that Boxer correctly resolves a path like /The Quick Brown Fox/Jumped.Over.the.Lazy.Dog to its miserable DOSBox equivalent, \THEQUI~1\JUMPED~1.DOG. Which almost never comes up in practice, but is nice to have nonetheless.
The second of these features is smarter behaviour when quitting games. Previously, Boxer gave you a “Press any key to close” message once a game had exited, which was of no use if the program crashed or you needed to tweak the settings or what-have-you. Now, Boxer asks you whether you would like to close the window or return to the DOS prompt:
This is courtesy of the really quite lovely WBAT dialog library by Horst Schaeffer; I’ll be using this dialog library for other Boxer DOS-prompt tools in future.
Design by 40watt.