
Boxer is a Slick App That Brings DOS Gaming to Your Mac - rjim86
http://thenextweb.com/apps/2012/01/05/boxer-is-an-awesome-free-mac-app-that-lets-you-relive-your-dos-playing-days/?awesm=tnw.to_1CSrb&utm_campaign=social%20media&utm_medium=Spreadus&utm_source=Twitter&utm_content=Boxer%20is%20an%20awesome%20free%20Mac%20app%20that%20lets%20you%20relive%20your%20DOS%20playing%20days
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Zirro
The headline says "Slick", but in my opinion this goes even further than that.
Every part of it that I've seen so far is beautiful. That includes the
homepage, too. This is the kind of really well-made apps that made me switch
to OS X in the first place. Would love to see (much) more of this :)

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embwbam
XCOM UFO Defense. Greatest game ever. Just started a new game for kicks on
superhuman. First UFO landing, every soldier died. Perfect!

~~~
bitops
That game is a testament to the immortality of well-done software. I still
play it today, and it's still scary doing those first night missions against
the sectoids.

On a related note...do any of us care what language or environment those games
were implemented in? The software rocks. That's good enough. :)

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lparry
Boxer + GOG.com = retro heaven. It's just a shame you need a windows pc to get
the GOG installer to extract the setup installers

~~~
bitops
If you're willing to make the investment, VMWare Fusion is great for that.
Though of course you still have to obtain a copy of Windows afterwards. I've
addressed this by taking my ancient, ancient Windows laptop and running a
program provided by VMWare that creates an image from your physical machine.
(I've forgotten its name at present).

To make the creation process go faster, I usually restore the machine to
factory defaults. That way, the registry is smaller and everything is much
smoother.

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peterjmag
I love Boxer! It's beautifully designed, and it's handled everything I've
thrown at it so far with aplomb. Some of my favorites to revisit: Monuments of
Mars, Scorched Earth, Commander Keen, Dark Forces.

~~~
zaph0d
No wonder, Boxer is built on top of DOSBox, the industry standard FOSS DOS
emulator.

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choocoolat
<http://boxerapp.com/>

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dhbanes
It's about time to revisit Day of the Tentacle :)

~~~
_frog
For adventure games running on the SCUMM scripting engine I really suggest you
check out ScummVM[1]. It's similar to DOSBox in some regards, but it's
designed to run old adventure games, namely those from LucasFilm Games. It
even runs games designed for Windows systems on OS X and Linux (The Curse of
Monkey Island works great for example).

[1]: <http://www.scummvm.org/>

~~~
dhbanes
Awesome, thanks for this.

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kellishaver
I downloaded this a while ago with the intention of installing a few games and
then got sidetracked with work (or perhaps unsidetracked) and forgot all about
it. Thanks for the reminder! It does indeed look nicely done.

 _Rest well this night, for tomorrow you sail for the kingdom of Daggerfall._

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makmanalp
It would be a smart move for gog.com to buy these guys out and also port it to
linux and windows, and use it as their main steam-like thing (without the
lockin).

Edit: Oops, looks like it's open source already. Great!

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stevenp
Great. Now, thanks to Space Quest III, I will not get any work done this
month.

~~~
abestor
Be sure to grab the MT-32 ROMs too, so you can enjoy Space Quest III as it was
originally intended! INSERT BUCKAZOID and all. (They don't come with Boxer for
legal reasons, but they're easy to find from a Google search.)

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bitops
One game that I've searched high and low for is Hyperspeed by Microprose. Few
people seem to have played it but it was one of the best strategy games ever
made.

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slowpoke
My first thought: There's already DOSBox (which I bet was already ported to
Mac), what's the point?

 _> It's powered by DOSBox._

My second thought after reading that: DOSBox is GPL'd, where's the source of
Boxers?

 _> Clicking through a few links: <https://github.com/alunbestor/Boxer> _

Well, okay, I really don't get the point of this "App" but I guess as long as
it's free software...

~~~
FreeFull
It looks like the DOSBox equivalent of Winebottler to me

~~~
slowpoke
I really don't get the point of that either. As far as I can tell, it wraps...
Wine. What's the purpose? I could just run Wine (or DOSBox) directly, same
result.

~~~
abestor
(Disclosure: I'm the developer of Boxer.)

Boxer does a whole lot more than wrap up games. If you have a Mac, just
download Boxer and give it a spin: the difference between Boxer and DOSBox
will be immediately apparent.

If you don't have a Mac or don't feel like trying it out, then here's an
exhaustive answer I gave to a similar question in a previous thread about
Boxer (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2363917>):

\-------

Boxer uses DOSBox as its emulation core, but it has a completely redesigned UI
and workflow for installing and playing games.

Boxer bundles DOS games into gameboxes, a self-contained app-like package
format that appears as a single file to OSX and can be launched by double-
clicking. Each gamebox is a self-contained DOS ecosystem that contains the
game and everything it needs to run: drive folders and images, configuration
settings, documentation etc. They're path-independent, which means they can be
stored wherever you like, moved around, backed up easily, and shared with
friends: without needing to reconfigure anything inside the gamebox.

You can create gameboxes by drag-and-dropping game CDs, floppies, disc images
or folders onto Boxer's game import window. Boxer guides you through the
game's installer if needed, then packages the game up into a gamebox (and rips
its CD to an image, if appropriate).

Boxer aims to make DOS games require zero configuration and zero knowledge of
the emulator's esoteric inner workings. It automatically sets up drives
appropriately; it also pre-configures hundreds of games that need custom
emulation settings, with more automatic configurations added in each new
version. If needed, you can tweak common emulation settings (like CPU speed,
emulation optimizations and mouse behaviour) directly while you play, using
Boxer's inspector window.

The inspector also lets you add and eject DOS drives by drag-and-drop, at any
time while you're playing a game: this lets you easily hot-swap CDs and
floppies for multi-disc games. To this end, Boxer also auto-mounts any CDs or
floppies you insert while playing, and removes them from DOS once they're
ejected.

You can resize and zoom Boxer's window while you play, and toggle between
rendering styles (HQx etc.) on the fly. Boxer's renderer has much sharper
graphics than DOSBox at large window sizes, and has dramatically better
fullscreen support: you can access the menu, dock and inspector window in
fullscreen by unlocking the mouse, and switch back and forth to other
applications easily from fullscreen. This is handy for checking up a PDF game
manual for instance: which Boxer scans gameboxes for, and displays
automatically in the Help menu for easy access.

While you’re at the DOS prompt, the window displays a slide-out program
launcher tray so you can run the game program with a single click; while
you’re running a game installer, the tray displays installation tips instead
to help you through common installer questions.

Boxer has plug-and-play joystick support, letting you add and remove joysticks
at any time with zero configuration. Boxer automatically corrects axis and
button layouts for a number of popular HID controllers that are otherwise
broken to the point of unusability with regular DOSBox. It also integrates
with Joypad (<http://getjoypad.com>) so you can use your iPhone or iPod Touch
as a controller if you so desire.

Boxer reimplements DOSBox's standard 2-axis, 4-axis, Thrustmaster and
Flightstick Pro joystick modes, and adds a racing wheel emulation mode with
axis behaviour designed for driving games (this mode uses tilt control in
Joypad incidentally, which is a surprisingly cool way to play). Boxer's
Flightstick Pro throttle emulation also has assists for gamepad thumbsticks
and displays an on-screen throttle indicator. You can switch joystick modes on
the fly while you're playing.

Boxer also has built-in Munt MT-32 emulation: you'll need to find the ROMs
yourself, but adding them to Boxer is just drag-and-drop. Boxer automatically
enables MT-32 emulation for over 400 games, so there's no need to manually
switch between MIDI emulation modes. Boxer's MT-32 emulation even displays the
MT-32's LCD messages in a spiffy bezel - something no other emulator does to
my knowledge. Boxer can also detect if you have a real MT-32 plugged into your
Mac, and if so will automatically pipe MT-32 music to it (though not General
MIDI - it can tell the difference).

Apart from that, Boxer has the usual trappings of a Cocoa app: proper menus,
sane keyboard shortcuts, integrated Apple Help and automatic application
updates.

I think that about covers it.

~~~
slowpoke
Thanks for giving a detailed explanation, I appreciate it, and I do see some
of the plus factor this adds over DOSBox.

To my personal defense: I just don't like it when people build meaningless
abstractions over existing tools, and Boxers looked like just that to me at
first, and I might have jumped to conclusions. I've been proven wrong and have
to apologize.

~~~
abestor
It's worth noting that vanilla DOSBox is much, _much_ harder to use on OS X
than it is on Windows. DOSBox on OSX cannot open EXE files directly and OSX
has no concept of application shortcuts: so you cannot just right-click->Open
With on EXE files to launch them, or set up shortcuts for your games that pass
different startup parameters to DOSBox, like you can in Windows.

Instead, to launch a game with a custom configuration file (pretty much a
necessity if you have more than one game you want to play) means typing in the
following lovely command in the terminal:

/Applications/DOSBox.app/Contents/MacOS/DOSBox -conf
/path/to/my/game/config.conf

...each time, or learning Applescript or bash scripting in order to write your
own launcher script for each game to run the appropriate commands. That, on
top of learning DOSBox's config file and mount syntax so you can write the
configuration files each game needs. Needless to say, this is way too much
work for the majority of would-be users on the Mac, even those who have a
working knowledge of MS-DOS.

Users who overcome that learning curve still have to contend with things that
simply _don't work at all_ in the DOSBox OSX build: like swapping one physical
CD for another while playing (DOSBox keeps the CD busy so it can't eject, and
the new CD would be at the wrong path anyway), or using fullscreen mode in OS
X 10.7 (broken in DOSBox 0.74), or using Tandy emulation mode on a PowerPC mac
(graphics glitches galore) or pausing the game (the default pause key doesn't
exist on a Mac keyboard, and even if you rebind it the emulator will not
unpause once paused) and so on and so on.

Boxer doesn't just provide added value; it provides a usable DOS emulator for
the Mac in the first place.

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driverdan
While Boxer is great it isn't new. I'm surprised it hasn't gotten coverage on
HN before.

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rjim86
did anyone tried Blood game ..

