Boxer 1.3 has just been released: with significant improvements to GOG game importing, and fixes for several GOG games that wouldn't import or run correctly under previous versions (including the perennial favorite ). [url=http://boxerapp.com/releasenotes#boxer_1.3]The full list of changes is here, including notes about those GOG-specific game fixes.

(As with previous versions, note that Boxer cannot extract games directly from GOG installer EXEs: you’ll need a Windows PC or a Windows emulator to run the installer, then you can import the installed game files into Boxer.)

As always, let me know either in this thread, or via Boxer's “Send Feedback” menu item, if you encounter problems importing or running any of your GOG DOS games. Happy gaming!

Hi there - I want to say thanks again for all of your hard work. I was really pleased to see this update in Sparkle and it's working great with all of my test games so far. The new volume controls are an especially welcome touch - I really had no idea you went through so much suffering just for a volume slider!

I did want to ask you: what are your thoughts on rolling in some of the patches adding 3Dfx Glide support to DOSBox into Boxer? It'd be nice to have given the recent addition of Tomb Raider 1 and 2, and the coming arrival of Carmageddon.

If only there was a Windows front-end that was as nice. *le sigh* I played around with Boxer when I still had a Mac, and it was definitely the slickest experience with DOSBox I've ever had. The automatic window-screen scaling was one of its best features.

i too would like to say thank you. you are a wonderful human bean. :)

DBGL is my favorite cross-platform DOSBox frontend. I use it on my old Ubuntu laptop. It doesn't have all of the nice UI features as Boxer, but it's a very easy to use (and configure) method of using DOSBox.

So it goes with a lot of Boxer features, but it’s a good kind of hurt ;) There's now another new blog post covering some of the other implementation details in Boxer 1.3.

It may be of interest that Boxer’s GOG importing was rewritten again in 1.3, so that it's now much smarter about importing the folder structure using the configuration file's drive mounts as a guide. The most notable beneficiary of this was Rayman, but there are probably other GOG releases with funky folder structures that Boxer can import correctly now. I haven't checked the state of those patches lately but this is something I'd very much like to add, if it can be made to Just Work (no configuration, no extra driver downloads, enabled automatically when a game starts talking Glide.)

I suspect it won’t be an easy fit; last time I looked, at least one implementation relied on translating Glide calls into OpenGL rather than emulating the results in software. Boxer's renderer doesn't give the emulation layer direct GPU access at the moment, so considerable restructuring may be required there. A fairly major renderer rewrite is planned for the next Boxer release anyway however, to migrate to shaders.

What brought that question on was that I recently spotted a DOSBox Mac OS X wrapper that included a 3Dfx Glide patch, and I suspect that's what you're referring to (since it relies on OpenGLide). If it took that much effort to implement a volume slider, I can't imagine how must work it would be to restructure the renderer to account for Glide calls made to OpenGL...

I do have one question, in part inspired by the latest EA sale - how does joystick support work in Boxer? I'd like to try playing Wing Commander 1-3 and Privateer in Boxer, but I'm unclear on how I'd be able to configure or calibrate my joystick.

Oh, and thanks for the importing bug fix; I reinstalled Rayman Forever, and the process of getting the game to be imported was a lot more painless than the last time I tried...oh, and Alien Breed: Tower Assault works perfectly too; that was one game that gave me a lot of grief when I tried to configure and run it after importing it into Boxer.

Yup, this uses the patch that translates Glide into OpenGL, and it relies on overwriting a game’s own glide2x.ovl with one built for the port (in any acceptable Boxer implementation, Boxer would need to silently handle that itself). In later posts in that thread there's notes about texture glitches in certain games on nVidia Macs - not sure if those have been ironed out in recent versions of the patch, but it indicates the pitfalls of translation rather than software-level emulation. Basically it’s plug-and-play: see Boxer’s help file for details about joystick support and the different joystick emulation options. Boxer doesn’t let you rebind joystick buttons and axes yet (so you can't bind a button to a keyboard key for instance), but it's very smart about choosing a sensible layout and automatically uses tailored layouts for certain common controllers. Support for 360 and PS3 controllers is particularly good, because Boxer makes proper use of the triggers.

Joystick support works very well out of the box in Wing Commander 1, 2 and Privateer. The original version of Wing Commander 3 has finicky joystick calibration that doesn't like joysticks with a circular travel (like a 360 or PS3 pad for instance). These problems are fixed by a joystick patch you can get from wcnews.com. A discussion of the problem, including a link to the patch, is here on the Boxer blog: http://boxerapp.com/blog/2011/07/18/is-that-a-flightstick-in-your-pocket/#comment_6576

As a caveat: joystick support in DOS games will never be as painless as on a console or modern PC, and after a point there’s nothing an emulator can really do about it. DOS games almost always need joystick calibration (simply because of how analog gameport joysticks worked), and many need you to specifically enable joystick control in their game options before they'll even pay attention to joystick input. Boxer does catch when a game isn't listening to the joystick, and will warn you to enable joystick support in-game if that's the case. AB: Tower Assault fell foul of a bug in DOSBox 0.74 - it would freeze in vanilla DOSBox 0.74 too. GOG's own release of the game shipped with DOSBox 0.72 which didn't have the bug, and I patched a DOSBox CVS fix for the bug into Boxer 1.3.