Release notes: what’s new in each version.
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Interface refinements:
- New DOS Games folders will be given a spiffy new shelf appearance in icon view mode. If you want this appearance for your existing DOS Games folder: move it to the trash, let Boxer recreate it, then move your games from the trash back into the new one.
- If Boxer can’t find the DOS Games folder it will ask you for the location first instead of automatically recreating it. (Avoids problems after moving DOS Games to another volume.)
- You can override the “Windows-only program” warning to run a program anyway. Boxer will remember and not nag you about that program next time. (Avoids a lot of false positives, especially on OS X 10.4.)
- Completely rewrote DOS command messages into language that human beings can understand.
- Added new keyboard shortcuts for taking screenshots and recording movies.
Better game support:
- Upgraded to DOSBox 0.73 for faster and more robust emulation.
- Lots more compatibility fixes for installing and running finicky games.
- More lenient permissions on folders created by DOS, to avoid problems when sharing gameboxes between different user profiles.
Game installer improvements:
- Hold down ⌥ while installing a game to get more control over the installation process.
- Streamlined importing of games from Good Old Games and Steam.
- Now offers to import a game’s installation files when installing from anywhere, not just from CD. (Fixes games that come in a simple folder but expect to have a CD-ROM drive.)
- Game installer droplet now accepts disk images and audio CD volumes.
- Warnings when trying to install Mac- or Windows-only games.
General tidiness:
- The DOS Utilities folder is no longer required or created, though existing copies will continue to function. Boxer now loads its utilities and drivers from inside the Boxer application.
- Boxer’s default settings are now set internally instead of stored in the global
DOSBox Preferences.conf. This has been replaced by Shared Preferences.conf, which is for your own personal settings.
Bugfixes:
- Now fully Snow Leopard compatible.
- Growl notifications now work on OS X 10.4 (note that you still need to install Growl yourself.)
- Fixed failures resolving file paths on volumes whose name contains funky characteers (oh you wacky users.)
- Game installer no longer tries to do silly things like packaging up your Desktop or Downloads folder.
- Enough other little bugfixes to fill a sailboat.
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Installer improvements:
- Faster and more thorough game detection: now sniffs games that are outside packages or buried elsewhere within a package. Auto-configuration for more problem games too.
- Game installation is now better at figuring out when and how a game should be installed. An installer’s folder will also be mirrored as drive A, to support installers that expect to run from a floppy drive.
Interface improvements:
- Friendly message if Boxer does not have write permission to install necessary files.
- Improvements and clarifications to other dialogs.
- Better update-notification system (not that you’ll know until the next version!)
- Smarter behaviour after quitting a game: now asks if you’d like to close the window or return to the DOS prompt.
- Prettier DOS networking menu.
- Added several more useful DOS commands and rearranged DOS Utilities folder structure. To complete this update, Boxer will move its old utilities to the trash. Any utilities you have added yourself will remain.
Better support:
- Made Boxer’s internal version of DOSBox compatible with G3 PowerPCs.
- If an ISO fails to mount properly in DOS, Boxer will fall back to its OS X volume if available.
- Preliminary support for long filenames, and better support for special characters in filenames.
- Boxer will send error reports using your default email client, rather than always using Mail.app.
- Helper applets should now cope if you rename the Boxer application.
Bugfixes:
- Boxer no longer disables Spaces while it is running (this was on purpose, but turned out to suck.)
- Fixed startup crash message and broken keyboard detection on PowerPC Macs.
- Fixed the way Boxer saves CPU speed changes: now preserves the
auto setting.
- Lots of small fixes for OS X 10.4.
- Addressed some obscure startup crash problems.
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Smarter application behaviour:
- Includes four ready-to-play DOS games for new users: Commander Keen 4 and demos of Epic Pinball, Ultima Underworld and X-COM: UFO Defense.
- Launch Boxer directly to browse your DOS Games folder, rather than showing a DOS prompt like previous versions. There is now an “Open DOS Prompt” icon in the DOS Games folder that lets you do this instead. You can also hold down ⌥ as Boxer launches to start up with a DOS prompt.
- Drag-drop game packaging: drop game folders or CD-ROMs onto the “Drop games here to install them” icon in your DOS Games folder, and it will automatically install and package them.
- No more naggy questions about where you want to put things: Boxer chooses locations for your DOS Games folder and new game packages, which you can then rename or move as you please.
- Launching a game package from a read-only disk will copy it to your DOS Games folder first, to ensure the game can store its settings and savegames.
- Game packages remember changes to CPU speed and frameskip, without the need to fiddle with configuration files.
- Simple networking: run network at the DOS prompt to host or join a network.
- Hold down ⌥ when launching a package to choose which program to run inside the package.
- If Growl is installed, Boxer will use it for notifications of some events (OS X 10.5 only.)
- Startup notifications when a new version of Boxer is available.
Better CD-ROM support:
- Game installation will offer to bundle the game’s CD-ROM into its game package, to let you play without the CD.
- Increased free disk space when running programs from CD, to allow large games to install.
- Better mounting behaviour for CD-ROM images and hardware support for physical CD-ROMs, to hopefully improve game compatibility.
- Support for
.gog CD-ROM images, used by Good Old Games.
Other changes:
- Non-US keyboards are assigned the appropriate DOS layout automatically (fixing a lot of key mix-ups), and keyboard shortcuts work consistently across layouts.
- Larger window sizes: 3×, 4× and 6× scaling for 1280×800+, 1920×1200+ and 2560×1600+ displays respectively. Also switched to bilinear filtering to avoid stretch-marks.
- DOS drivers and utilities are now stored in the DOS Games folder for easier access. The old
home folder/Library/Application Support/Boxer folder from previous versions can be deleted safely.
- Added edit, move and other commands from FreeDOS, along with Unix-style shortcuts for common DOS commands (ls, cp, rm etc.)
- Suppress OS X Spaces while Boxer is running, to avoid Spaces shortcuts interfering with keyboard controls.
- Mount drives before
[autoexec] sections are processed, allowing you to run programs on mounted drives from those sections.
- More helpful message when running Boxer on unsupported versions of OS X (10.3 and below).
- Added Swedish translation by Martin Svalin and Spanish translation by Rubén Martínez.
- Improved game compatibility and auto-configuration for several more games.
- Fixed a bunch of nasty bugs and tweaked some default DOSBox settings.
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- Default to a larger window size on hi-res screens (1440×900 and above.)
- After creating a new package, show the containing folder in Finder.
- Fixed error in OS X 10.4 when installing to a new package.
- Fixed error in OS X 10.4 when reporting an error (oh, the irony), and use fallback for error reporting if Mail.app is not available.
- Better troubleshooting tips and clarifications to hardware compatibility (no G3s with DOSBox 0.72.)
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Game package and game-installation improvements:
- Running a DOS installer program (e.g.
install.exe) which isn’t already in a game package will offer to install the game into a new package for you.
- Boxer now handles drive C more robustly and predictably:
- When launching a game package (or opening files inside one, no matter how deeply nested), the package will always be drive C. This means packages now act as self-contained little DOS machines.
- The rest of the time your DOS Games folder will be drive C, and files inside it (again, no matter how deeply nested) will be opened relative to it.
- Game packages can now run games from subfolders inside them. This will fix games that need to be run from
C:\GAMENAME\ rather than C:\.
- Mountable images/folders inside a game package can be named with the drive letter you want them to use: e.g.
E.iso, D.harddisk, B.floppy.
- Boxer now only auto-detects mounts and games inside packages, not inside regular folders. This reduces startup times for launching to a DOS prompt, but requires you to use packages for most tasks.
- Added auto-configuration for a dozen more games.
- More comprehensively-documented game configuration files.
Other changes:
- Boxer now chooses an appropriate label for mounted folders. This fixes physical CD-ROM detection for many games (ones that check the volume label of their CD.)
- Added the DOS Utilities folder, which is installed to
home folder/Library/Application Support/Boxer/ and mounted as drive Y. Gravis Ultrasound drivers are included here to make them available to all games.
- Recognise (most) Windows-only executables and give an alert instead of launching them.
- Prompt to close the DOS window after a program exits.
- Detect the resolution of the primary display and use it as the fullscreen resolution in
DOSBox Preferences.conf.
Currently this will not detect secondary displays nor reflect changes to the primary display.
- Added support for
.cdr disc images created by Disk Utility.
- Fixes for bugs under OS X 10.4.
- Improved error handling and error reporting in Boxer (does not apply to DOSBox errors).
- Disabled support for
.img disk images owing to too many false positives (which often cause DOSBox to crash). Support will be reintroduced once Boxer is smart enough to work out what a real disk image looks like.
- New DOSBox icon to distinguish individual DOSBox sessions from the main Boxer application in the Dock. Also a new icon for the Boxer disk-image, and minor improvements to other icons.
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- Fixed myriad bugs that were preventing Boxer from working in OS X 10.4.
- Working directory is now set to the folder of the current game, rather than root, which allows relative paths in DOSBox commands (e.g. MOUNT d "./folder_in_game_package/".)
- Added default axis/button mappings for joysticks, and changed
buttonwrap setting to false.
- Alert dialogs modified to fit Apple HIG guidelines better.
- Added auto-configuration for Ultima IV-VI.
- Added Finnish translation.
- Considerably revised website and release notes structure.
Mounting improvements:
- Recognise and mount
.cue CD-ROM images. These have been given the imported UTI com.goldenhawk.cdrwin-cuesheet.
- Recognise and mount
.img images. Currently these are always treated as floppy disk images; future versions will try to distinguish floppy, hard-disk and CD-ROM .imgs.
- Recognise and mount folders with the
.cdrom extension as CDROMs, with the .floppy extension as floppy disks, and with the .harddisk extension as hard disks. These new folder types carry the exported UTIs net.washboardabs.boxer-cdrom-folder, net.washboardabs.boxer-floppy-folder and net.washboardabs.boxer-harddisk-folder respectively.
- Automatically mount any CD-ROM images (
.iso, .cue and .cdrom files), floppy images (.img and .floppy files) and hard disk images (.harddisk files) found inside a game’s folder/package. This allows configuration-free mounting: just drop your images into your game’s folder and Boxer will mount them.
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- Auto-mount any CD-ROMs or CD-ROM images that are currently mounted in OS X.
- Changed the cycles and frameskip keyboard shortcuts from +/- to up/down arrows, to avoid remapping hassles with non-US keyboards.
- Added keyboard shortcut for turbo mode.
- Updated UTI declarations to better reflect format conformance, match official Apple descriptions and embrace OSType codes.
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