Boxer 0.87 (née 0.86) has now, finally, been released. There’s a chummy what’s-new summary on the front page, or the tediously complete release notes if you prefer. In brief though: Snow Leopard compatibility, 8 months’ worth of bugfixes, tasteful wood panelling.
I wanted to get this version out there right away, since the crumbly old 0.85 release was disastrously broken on Snow Leopard (which hit the streets this Friday.) There will probably be a minor followup release in the next week or two with additional localisations.
Unfortunately Snow Leopard forced my hand in another respect: the new 10.6 Finder alters the icon view layout and refuses to show background images larger than 2048x2048, both of which broke my original shelf art. I’ve applied a quick fix whereby 10.6 gets a different (and much smaller) background, which means folders have fewer shelf slots before the art runs out. I hope to address this with a more thoughtful and robust solution in future updates… once I see whether the shelf idea appeals to Boxer’s users in the first place.
Rapidly growing irritation with Snow Leopard edit: The default Finder grid spacing has changed for new user accounts, meaning that the shelf icons may appear misaligned. To correct this: open DOS Games, press CmdJ and pull the grid spacing slider all the way to the right.
DOSBox 0.73 was released today, with a slurry of improvements to speed, stability and emulation accuracy. Hence Boxer 0.86 is around the corner, and will be released next week (after testing and tweaking) to bundle the new DOSBox. This version will still be based on the same Applescript codebase as 0.85 and will include several game tweaks, installer improvements and bugfixes that came up since the 0.85 release.
An update to the 0.9 beta branch is further away, since it is integrated much more tightly with DOSBox and I need to go through the new codebase file by file sticking my grubby fingers back into it.
Because I love you, Boxer 0.85 is now available. Yes, this was called Boxer 0.81, but then I skipped a few versions out of vanity; there were so many improvements that a teeny 0.01 bump felt terribly meagre. Full release notes are here, but in brief this version is prettier, smarter and (I hope) more reliable in every respect. The new version will also be rolled out by automatic update in the next couple of days, once all you early adopters have stubbed your toes on it.
This release was made possible by me managing to install a copy of OS X 10.4 to a USB stick, so I could finally do proper testing. It’s amazing what you can do with these computer things these days.
Have a merry non-denominational holiday everyone, and please don’t give me any bug reports for christmas.
Edit: concerned about the linear relationship between Boxer’s girth and my hosting bill, I’ve trimmed the 0.85 download to a svelte 16.6 MB from 19.2 MB. This was done by optimising icons and removing unused emulation files from the Gravis Ultrasound drivers. If you have already downloaded 0.85, don’t bother doing it again; there have been no changes in functionality.
Get it now! The major changes are summarised breathlessly on the main download page, while the tedious nitty-gritty is in the changelog.
Despite the tiny 0.1 version increment, this version has the most improvements so far. Boxer 0.8 is a lot smarter about your Mac, more reliable, starts up faster, and asks fewer naggy questions. It also comes with a drag-drop game installer, which should take the guesswork out of installing and packaging games.
The riskiest change in Boxer 0.8 is that doubleclicking on Boxer no longer opens a DOS prompt: instead it shows your DOS games folder in Finder so you can browse your games. To get a DOS prompt now, you can either click on the DOS prompt icon in the DOS games folder, or just hold down Option as you start up Boxer.
For most users this should simply cut out the chore of navigating to the DOS games folder before launching a game. However, I expect there are users who prefer to fly by the seat of their pants and would rather have the old behaviour back. If the new behaviour bothers you, please get in touch and I can offer a custom workaround for now.
As astute readers may notice, the website has been reorganised and sports this spiffy new diary. I'm hoping this will be a good way for me to discuss where Boxer is going in future versions, and get feedback on where it has already gone. That is, as soon as I can work out how to get the comments module to work properly.
Design by 40watt.