Let’s maintain the convenient fiction that you won’t just google “abandonware” and avail yourself of the many websites for pirated DOS games instead.
Seeing Dark Forces really brings me back.
edit: after reading through the thread, I realize I'm the 3rd or 4th person to say that Dark Forces "brings me back." Sorry to add so little, but it's also fascinating that so many of us have such fond memories of that one game.
It simulates a computer entirely in software, which is expensive. This is different from for example Virtualbox which virtualizes a computer, and still executes most of the instructions directly on the processor.
Modern preemptive multitasking operating systems send the CPU to sleep when there's no work to be done. In DOS, the currently running app or game usually just used every available cycle (aside from interrupts handled by the BIOS or DOS) for its own purposes. I don't know if Dosbox has some kind of limiter in place, but if not, the game/app will eat every single cycle it can unless it's specifically designed to wait for the vsync interrupt.
At least one of those screenshots is going to pull some heart strings for people who played games way back when.
I became a PC gamer at the tail end of DOS gaming, when Command & Conquer was only available on DOS and Dark Forces was released to mild acclaim. That shot of Dark Forces brings me back…
Dark Forces strikes me as an odd choice, since at that time period, LucasArts had in-house Mac porting developers. Dark Forces, Loom, and even Sam & Mac got classic Mac OS ports that supported better graphics resolutions than the DOS games of that time period. Pity it was mostly based on the work of one key developer who moved on after a couple of years…
Dosbox was not self-contained [i.e. when you fire it up, you have to mount a directory and then run the game]. It looks like boxer makes the .app for you
You're right - Boxer's homepage did actually acknowledge DOSBox until a couple of days ago, when I rewrote most of the copy and in the process took it out. I now realise this was caddish of me, and have added the acknowledgement back in.
It wasn't my intention to take credit for DOSBox's work; it’s an excellent emulator and responsible for 90% of what Boxer does. However, it's also extremely painful to use on the Mac - and I wanted to avoid the suggestion that Boxer's user experience was like that of DOSBox’s.
As airolson noted, DOSBox is also prominently credited within Boxer itself.
Boxer started its life as a sort of frontend but is now a fork of DOSBox. All of the changes are meant to fix (replace) the awful workflow that DOSBox currently has with mounting drives and tweaking config files and etc.
DOSBox is mentioned in the About window, the credits, and Boxer itself when you launch a gamebox. It also used to be on the website, though checking now I'm not sure where it's gone.
Boxer is properly GPL and you can find the source code here:
Boxer uses DOSBox as its emulation core, but it has a completely redesigned UI and workflow for preparing and playing games.
Boxer bundles DOS games into gameboxes, a self-contained app-like package format that appears as a single file in Finder 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: drives, 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 if appropriate).
Boxer aims to make games require zero configuration and zero knowledge of the emulator's esoteric inner workings. It automatically pre-configures dozens of games that need custom emulation settings, and more automatic configurations are added as they are found. If needed though, you can tweak common emulation settings (like CPU speed and mouse behaviour) while you play, using Boxer's inspector window.
The inspector also lets you add cover art to your games, again by drag-and-drop: images are processed to look like shiny game boxes and become the Finder icon for the game. These icons fit in especially well in the DOS Games folder - the default location for imported games - which can be optionally given an iBooks-style wooden shelf appearance.
Additionally, the inspector lets you add and eject DOS drives by (all together now) drag-and-drop, at any time while you're playing a game. This lets you easily hot-swap CDs and floppies. To this end, Boxer also auto-mounts any CDs or floppies you mount while playing, and removes them from DOS once they're ejected.
Boxer's emulation window lets you resize and zoom it to your heart's content, and allows you to toggle between rendering filters (HQx etc.) on the fly. There's a new renderer which has much sharper graphics at large window sizes, and has markedly improved fullscreen support (allowing you to access the menu and switch to other applications - handy for checking up a PDF game manual for instance, which Boxer incidentally scans gameboxes for and displays in the Help menu). While you’re at the DOS prompt, the window also displays a slide-out program launcher tray; while you’re running a game installer, it displays installation tips instead.
Apart from that, Boxer has the usual trappings of a Cocoa app: proper menus, sane keyboard shortcuts, integrated Apple Help and automatic application updates.
Let me know (via the Send Feedback link in Boxer's app menu) where you got your copy of Stunts from - I'll check it out and see if the import process needs tweaking there.
Seeing Dark Forces really brings me back.
edit: after reading through the thread, I realize I'm the 3rd or 4th person to say that Dark Forces "brings me back." Sorry to add so little, but it's also fascinating that so many of us have such fond memories of that one game.