Keen observers will have noted a lack of visible progress on Boxer 1.0 over the past two months and may, perhaps, have lamented with wailing and beating of breast the dearth of new builds since January.
The principal reason for this delay was that I spent most of March on an impromptu and much-needed visit to my sheep-infested homeland and most of February frantically arranging said visit. As of Thursday, and after an unconscionable number of inflight movies, I am now back on terra firma and reacclimatising to dour Finland.
The other reason has been that in a fit of hubris I embarked on an ambitious rewrite of DOSBox’s old rendering pipeline: essentially replacing SDL’s renderer with my own, to give Boxer much tighter control over how DOSBox's video output gets to the screen. The benefits:
The drawback: by the time I’d finished tugging on that loose thread to my satisfaction, I had unravelled the entire sweater. Now I need to knit it all back again before anything works and I can release another build.
Understandably that’s a big job — among other things, mouse input is comprehensively, gloriously broken — so I’ve been entirely avoiding it by coding up paste-to-DOS-prompt and floppydisk detection instead. As soon as my USB floppy drive arrives, I can finally get some use out of my mint-condition Star Wars: TIE Fighter diskettes. Go team!
Design by 40watt.