Boxer

Developer diary: plans and progress reports.

By browsing this website you are agreeing to our use of cookies.

I love OS updates (yes, a new beta) Sunday 13th September 2009

Boxer 0.88 is in beta, and will be a point release to address bugs and incompatibilities that came to light from 0.87 and OS X 10.6. This version includes the usual aimless refactoring to bring about yet more bugs, so please report anything odd you find.

The biggest change in this version is switching DOSBox back from OpenGL to overlay output mode, which avoids a rendering bug on OS X 10.6.1 wherein the DOS window may appear blank until moved. Unfortunately, overlay rendering also sucks; this change will mean that fullscreen mode may show stretch-marks at certain resolutions, and the DOS window may appear off-center if you have a large screen. There are a lot of impolitic things I would like to say at this point, but let’s leave it that my contempt has now reached the stratosphere.

This version also tweaks the Snow Leopard shelf artwork to match OS X 10.6’s default grid spacing, which is unfortunately not under Boxer’s control. This will not affect existing folders, but if you have upgraded from 10.5 to 10.6 then new DOS Games folders may appear misaligned until you tweak the grid spacing from the View Options panel (J.)

What next?

0.88 will hopefully be the final release on this Applescript codebase, which has long outstayed its welcome. I’ll then return to work on the 0.9 Cocoa branch, which brings with it countless clever features and ease-of-use improvements (among other things, a rendering mode that isn’t shit), and the ability to introduce substantial new improvements instead of just bailing out water whenever there’s an OS X update.

Sadly 0.9 will probably not be OS X 10.4-compatible, so it’s of particular importance to me that 0.88 works as well as it can on the venerable old Tiger. Report them bugs!

Design by 40watt.