With some sterling support from Jef Wambacq I now have my own customised SDL and DOSBox building properly, which opens a whole world of whoppertunities. I am on a mission from God to fix bugs and improve compatibility with OS X, which so far has meant:
CD audio tracks are now playing properly—let there be sound!
The DOS window now has functional OS X menus for commonly-needed emulator controls:
Of interest to noone will be that the menu shortcuts now use OS X’s key-handling system instead of SDL’s, which means they actually work.
The DOS window’s titlebar is now a lot tidier, and only displays emulation info (such as CPU cycles) when it is relevant.
DOSBox has been slathered in my own branding and now makes almost no mention of DOSBox itself. I justify this to myself on the grounds that it only causes confusion between the two apps otherwise.
Boxer now remembers whether you were running in windowed or fullscreen mode last time and starts up in the same mode. This is remembered per-user, not per-game.
CoreMIDI support is built in, which should please you faithful MT-32 owners out there (sorry everyone else, there’s no MT-32 emulation as yet.)
A new beta should be out in the next few days, once I get this baby to build for OS X 10.4 and PowerPCs.
Happy 2009!
Ok sensation-seekers, there’s now a Betacast feed which tracks Boxer beta versions, just like the Appcast feed tracks official releases. Each version entry has a list of changes and a link to download that version.
If you’re not afraid of a bug or two then give the betas a go; the latest one lets you finesse the game installation process by holding down Option as you drag-drop a game. Please let me know about any bugs you find and any new features you love or hate, preferably before I go and release.
Please don’t link to beta versions though: old beta downloads are likely to disappear on a regular basis, and besides which they might contain herpes. And you wouldn’t want to give your friends herpes.
As a side note, Boxer betas will automatically check for newer betas at startup, as well as newer releases. Which is nice.
Boxer is busy cramming European languages, because we all know the ladies love a continental man. It’s currently studying Dutch, Italian and Norwegian, and might try to pick up a smattering of French and Brazilian Portuguese too before the next release. Bonjoooouuuur.
Design by 40watt.