What is Reddit's opinion of
Boxer?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments
37 reviews of this app found across Reddit:
To bootstrap a development environment on a modern computer:
- DOSBOX (free)
- Borland Turbo C++ (free)
- (recommended) A good DOSBOX frontend (on Mac OSX, try the excellent Boxer - also free)
This tutorial makes for an entertaining afternoon, but requires some familiarity with the C programming language.
Since DOS games can't just be drag-and-drop like console games, it doesn't fall under the intended scope of the project, and there really aren't any plans to integrate it. Boxer (based on DOSBox) is really good for emulating DOS on OS X.
Given that Tie Fighter is an old DOS game, and that Good Old Games tends to release games as optimized DOSBox applications, you could probably have decent luck running it in Boxer in OS X. I may try that myself later today; if it works I can let you know if you'd be interested.
Macbook Pro 17" here. I wouldn't try any AAA games on max settings as the puter would just burn up, but I play lots of smaller games on Steam, and older PC games on Bootcamp. It did run Unreal Tournament 2004 perfectly though ;) (with the Logitech MX mouse)
I'd recommend Boxer for old DOS games and OpenEMU for all things emulated including PS1 and PSP games.
I've been a Mac user since ever, first as a graphics designer and now a web developer. I focus most my gaming on Playstation.
Yes, the original Gabriel Knight can absolutely run on your Mac. You can run Boxer which will emulate MS-DOS for you. There are more specific instructions here on getting it up and running.
If you're having trouble with getting Boxer running, you can also play Gabriel Knight using ScummVM for Mac.
Also if you are into emulators to run 90s and early arcade, console, and PC games you can have a great time, since even though the specs on this machine aren’t amazing it’s way more powerful than old computers were. Look at MAME, Boxer, and other emulators. Finding the game ROMs is a matter between you, your priest, and google.
You'll need a program that tricks the game into thinking it's running in DOS. I don't know what the hot one is now, but there's DOSBox and Boxer(Mac only) but they both appear to be dead development wise. Boxer might be easier but I've never used it as I don't have a Mac. http://boxerapp.com/
You can download Arena and Daggerfall from here.
If you have a Mac, Boxer is a very friendly DosBox front-end.
The Internet Archive also has a copy of A Final Unity that is playable in a web browser, but you won't be able to save your game.
It's a small thing, but maybe update the list of emulators along the right side? e.g. swap out DOSBox for Boxer, and swap out MAME OS X for the newer precompiled SDL MAME, and add a link to the precompiled MESS-Universal, which could satisfy a lot of emulation needs for Mac users.
If you're on a Mac, check out Boxer. It's a DOSBox front-end that makes setting up and running games very easy. It even packages the game and configuration files in a .App folder so you can move and launch DOS games like a standard OS X application.
You want Boxer which is basically a front end for dosbox. It makes dosbox super user friendly. You just select the installer files with Boxer, boxer prompts you to select the correct .exe to run and Boxer creates a nice little packaged application featuring your DOS game.
Daggerfall works fine in Boxer over here.
I think Arena does, too, but i never actually played that longer than a few minutes for curiosity's sake.
Along similar lines, I always loved what Boxer (OS X fronted to DOSBox) did with your game library. It would ask for box art when adding the game to your library, apply a little gloss to it and set it as the file's icon in Finder, then set the game folder's background to a 3D shelf texture, it looked great as you can see here.
I wonder if something similar would be possible with file associations and whatnot in Explorer? Feel free to chime in if you're a Windows developer and know anything about this, it's been quite some time since I've developed on Windows and I'm sure a lot has changed.
Obviously I have DOSbox and have used it to play hundreds of old games over the years (I've actually recently discovered Boxer and have been playing around with it).
CNR is one of the few games I don't think I ever got working reliably with it, not sure why. maybe something to do with DOS4GW. I've googled the problem and many others had the same problem.
It's old enough that you could probably play it with the Mac Version of DOSBox, or maybe Boxer.
I've found out the reason I thought it was yellow. The Old Olivetti PC2 clone I played it on had one of those yellow high contrast monitors you used to get in offices: basically everything was yellow on it.
I have a feeling that this may be pirated software, but if you could somehow find an "Abandoned Gamesroom" that might have lucasarts and sierra games to download, they could have Tie Fighter classic and Tie Fighter CD versions to download.
Then: To get them to work on the mac, use Boxer. Its really nice. I'm not sure at all how joystick support is, but I've played tie fighter just fine on Boxer using the mouse.
Awesome. :) The feature I had in mind was support for loading Boxer gameboxes. Boxer is a Dosbox fork for MacOS. A gamebox is simply a small folder structure with certain naming conventions for the files and folders within; there is not much fancy HFS+ resource fork stuff going on as far as I can tell. I'd be happy to go into great detail about the subject of how gameboxes work; I used to roll my own.
My interest from this stems from the fact that I've had to bail out of the Mac platform due to Apple's transition to ARM CPUs; there is an ARM version of Boxer currently in beta, but the Boxer situation is not the only reason the ARM Macs aren't useful to me. Given the extraordinary size of my Boxer collection, I would naturally like to make the transition to Windows as easy as possible.
Unfortunately, I'm not sure if this is entirely doable; Boxer does some eccentric things--there's a Documentation folder for PDFs and JPGs and things, which are not intended to be accessed within DOS itself and are instead passed to the OS' default viewer for that file type. And the DOSBox Preferences.conf file in each gamebox is a stub that contains only those settings that differ from the default .conf that Boxer comes with; I'm not sure how or if Dosbox-X would handle that. But I suppose it doesn't hurt to ask. :) Though I won't be offended if the answer is no; I have no idea how hard this might be to implement and it is not impossible that I'm the only person on Earth who would benefit if it were. :P Either way, thank you. :)
The enhanced CD will require an old install of Windows 3.1/95 or Macintosh System 8 or 9, depending upon the year of the disc. The enhanced portion of the disc (for stuff made in the late 90's) is usually created with Macromedia Director, using a self-playing projector.
Your best bet is to make an BIN/CUE disc image of the disc first, using a program like AnyToISO. This will preserve the data track and all of the audio tracks separately.
From there, you will need to install Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 using Boxer for Mac, which will allow you to emulate those older operating systems. You can also emulate an older Macintosh using a program called Mini vMac.
These are all fairly time intensive jobs if you've never done them before. Best of luck!
The first Command & Conquer, or a different C&C game?
Mac doesn't have a good track record for C&C, the franchise is predominantly PC-centric, and most if not all of the Mac ports no longer work as backwards compatability has been dropped over the years, for instance the Generals port is 32 bit and no longer works. CnCNet holds the legal freeware downloads, but the Mac versions appear to have been removed.
Your options on Mac are to emulate PC or a PC environment, maybe with something like Parallels or WINE, or run Windows as a dual boot with Boot Camp. For the DOS games though you can run those in something like Boxer
If your Mac OS is about 5 years old, you might be able to run the Mac ports fine, though I couldn't help you with sourcing them
As a PC gamer (first game game I ever bought was Space Quest 3 so I'm a long time Sierra fanboy) this episode was a delight. I wanted to marry Eva when she said she uses the boxer app to play these games. All the talk about OG Sierra games really hit me.
Really hope we get more PC centric games on the podcast. There are a plethora of FMV games that came out in the mid 90s that HDTGP would have a field day with like Ripper that had a cast including Christopher Walken doing the best over the top impression of Walken along side Burgess Meredith and Jimmy Walker. Or the weirdest fucking game I've certainly ever played: Harverster which I cant even get type into words what a fever dream this game is.
If you go to the full release notes linked on that same page, each release note section has a link to download the referenced version.
The most recent 10.5 compatible version is the second download in the list.
for the DOS games, some work has been done to get Boxer to compile. There's some info on it on the GitHub repo.
I haven't tried it yet...
For older video game consoles, yes. Once I found OpenEmu I didn't bother looking further. However, there will be some edge cases where you'll have emulation issues since it uses cores that don't provide "perfect" hardware emulation (like bsnes). I'd say most people, myself included, will rarely run in to issues though. Read this for more info on what I mean.
If you're looking to emulate older DOS games on Mac, check out Boxer. It's DOSBox in a nice and pretty Mac GUI.
I used to run Nethack 3.4.3 with tiles using the DOS version through DOSbox. Apparently Nethack 3.6.0 can still run on DOS. http://boxerapp.com is a nice implementation of DOSbox for Mac OS X. More info: https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/MS-DOS#Today
You should be able to use Boxer (http://boxerapp.com/) and with sufficient Googling, the original DOS games (plenty of abandonware sites have them).
While you're at it, play Commander Keen 4: Secret of the Oracle. Probably my favorite DOS game ever.
Seriously give some thought to http://boxerapp.com/ and the Dos version of Fallout 1, Fallout 2 is a direct continuation of the plot of Fallout 1 and you will miss a lot of cool stuff if you only play 2.
I don't know about the GOG version of the game, as it won't let me view the specs without a GOG account. But the original DOS version can be played using DOSBOX. I find Boxer to be the best.
Well, I know what I'M going to be doing all night.
Hint to mac users: Use Boxer instead of DOSbox. It's much easier. Just download the game from DeadPlatypus' first link, unzip it, and drag and drop the whole folder into Boxer.
I've used Crossover Games, can recommend it. Especially for any game that has been out for at least a year and a half or so. I've had good luck with it so far. Newer games (anything .net framework 4.0 required) don't work... so that's sad news. But some good stuff will run on it even still.. pretty inexpensive program, and decent community support for workarounds and the like.
If you're looking to play really old games, Boxer is wonderful. It's a dosbox all nicely wrapped up. I recently installed TES:Daggerfall with very little finagling. So many classics.
They've broken up the iWork suite which means you can buy the only worthwhile iWork app by itself: Keynote. Pages is a decent app for writing word style documents and numbers is ok for small-ish spreasheets. But keynote is amazing.
Some apps other people have said which are great:
- Adium (awesome chat client for almost any protocol)
- The unarchiver (never think about archive formats ever again).
- Text Wrangler. Great if you do any coding at all. Less great for just plain text or markdown editing.
Some apps I haven't seen mentioned yet
- Transmission. Awesome (free) torrent client
- Sparrow is a wonderful mail client.
- Boxer great front-end for DOSbox.
There are a few cross-platform apps which have version parity on the mac, namely VLC and Truecrypt (many more but those are the ones I use regularly).
Bear in mind that you have a ton of very powerful apps already installed. Preview is a PDF and image viewer but it is also a powerful (and scriptable) image editing software. You can crop, resize, rotate, compress, etc. thousands of photos w/ just preview and an automator script.
I am also stuck gaming on a Mac for now. Here are a few games I enjoy that have Mac versions.
- Civilization IV and both expansion packs
- Frozen Synapse
- LucasArts adventure games, many of which have been ported to modern machines
- Cave Story and its remake, Cave Story Plus
Also, Boxer is a wonderful DOS emulator that is available exclusively for Mac OS.
I know there are lots of ways to play NetHack on a newer Mac now (personally, I play the DOS version via Boxer), but it is nice to know that there (seems to be) an Intel/Lion version in development.
You want the OSX version of DOSBox, with a BEYOND BRILLIANT front-end/wrapper for it:
Seriously. Thank me by playing MANHUNTER: NEW YORK and MANHUNTER: SAN FRANCISCO back-to-back.
I only use emulators occasionally, and I don't have a large amount of old games or programs for use with emulators. Because of that, I don't think I can offer any emulator-specific advice based on my own experiences.
On OS X, Boxer provides a pretty slick DOS emulator experience. It minimizes the amount of DOS command line use, packages games into what appear to be ordinary files, presents the game folder in a visually attractive way, and allows easy customization of game icons. However, it does not provide actual library functionality.