Boxer

Developer diary: plans and progress reports.

Ding! Friday 1st June 2012

Boxer levels up again, to 1.3! This version sports the volume controls I told you about last time: along with screenshotting and fast-forwarding, and a heaping helping of bugfixes. Full release notes are here, in HTML even this time.

I tried to make this release as boring as possible, but a couple of interesting improvements still snuck into it while I wasn't looking:

Smarter drive persistence

One of those why-didn’t-Boxer-always-do-this features: Gameboxes now remember all the drives you’ve added and queue them up next time you play, even drives that aren’t physically part of the gamebox.

Previously, Boxer would only ‘remember’ drives that were part of the gamebox you were playing. This meant that to get an outside drive to be mounted all the time, you either had to muck about with DOSBox mount commands or let Boxer physically import the drive into the gamebox. Which, you know, sucked.

So now: fire up a gamebox, add a new drive, and it’ll just be there every time you play the gamebox. You can rename or move the drive’s source folder or image, and the gamebox will still find it each time. Drag the drive out of the Drives panel and the gamebox will forget about it again. That’s that.

This finally makes it super-easy to share OSX documents with a DOS app, or share a bunch of utilities among several apps. It also frees you from having to do any drive-importing of your own: until and unless you want to share your gamebox with others.

I’m making this sound like a big fucking bright idea but seriously, why didn’t it always do this?


Copy-paste for all

Boxer 1.3 now boasts the ability to paste text from OS X into any DOS program (as well as the DOS prompt, which was supported already in Boxer 1.2.2).

Pasting still has some limitations: only ASCII characters can be pasted at the moment, so accents get lost in translation. And of course, you can’t copy text back from DOS (at least, not yet.)

But it's still awesome, dammit, so I'm going to bore you about how it works:


OK, that’s all! Go back to what you were doing. (Downloading another awesome Boxer update, that is.)

Design by 40watt.