[abestor]

(Disclosure: I'm the developer of Boxer.)

Boxer does a whole lot more than wrap up games. If you have a Mac, just download Boxer and give it a spin: the difference between Boxer and DOSBox will be immediately apparent.

If you don't have a Mac or don't feel like trying it out, then here's an exhaustive answer I gave to a similar question in a previous thread about Boxer (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2363917):

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Boxer uses DOSBox as its emulation core, but it has a completely redesigned UI and workflow for installing and playing games.

Boxer bundles DOS games into gameboxes, a self-contained app-like package format that appears as a single file to OSX 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: drive folders and images, 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 to an image, if appropriate).

Boxer aims to make DOS games require zero configuration and zero knowledge of the emulator's esoteric inner workings. It automatically sets up drives appropriately; it also pre-configures hundreds of games that need custom emulation settings, with more automatic configurations added in each new version. If needed, you can tweak common emulation settings (like CPU speed, emulation optimizations and mouse behaviour) directly while you play, using Boxer's inspector window.

The inspector also lets you add and eject DOS drives by drag-and-drop, at any time while you're playing a game: this lets you easily hot-swap CDs and floppies for multi-disc games. To this end, Boxer also auto-mounts any CDs or floppies you insert while playing, and removes them from DOS once they're ejected.

You can resize and zoom Boxer's window while you play, and toggle between rendering styles (HQx etc.) on the fly. Boxer's renderer has much sharper graphics than DOSBox at large window sizes, and has dramatically better fullscreen support: you can access the menu, dock and inspector window in fullscreen by unlocking the mouse, and switch back and forth to other applications easily from fullscreen. This is handy for checking up a PDF game manual for instance: which Boxer scans gameboxes for, and displays automatically in the Help menu for easy access.

While you’re at the DOS prompt, the window displays a slide-out program launcher tray so you can run the game program with a single click; while you’re running a game installer, the tray displays installation tips instead to help you through common installer questions.

Boxer has plug-and-play joystick support, letting you add and remove joysticks at any time with zero configuration. Boxer automatically corrects axis and button layouts for a number of popular HID controllers that are otherwise broken to the point of unusability with regular DOSBox. It also integrates with Joypad (http://getjoypad.com) so you can use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a controller if you so desire.

Boxer reimplements DOSBox's standard 2-axis, 4-axis, Thrustmaster and Flightstick Pro joystick modes, and adds a racing wheel emulation mode with axis behaviour designed for driving games (this mode uses tilt control in Joypad incidentally, which is a surprisingly cool way to play). Boxer's Flightstick Pro throttle emulation also has assists for gamepad thumbsticks and displays an on-screen throttle indicator. You can switch joystick modes on the fly while you're playing.

Boxer also has built-in Munt MT-32 emulation: you'll need to find the ROMs yourself, but adding them to Boxer is just drag-and-drop. Boxer automatically enables MT-32 emulation for over 400 games, so there's no need to manually switch between MIDI emulation modes. Boxer's MT-32 emulation even displays the MT-32's LCD messages in a spiffy bezel - something no other emulator does to my knowledge. Boxer can also detect if you have a real MT-32 plugged into your Mac, and if so will automatically pipe MT-32 music to it (though not General MIDI - it can tell the difference).

Apart from that, Boxer has the usual trappings of a Cocoa app: proper menus, sane keyboard shortcuts, integrated Apple Help and automatic application updates.

I think that about covers it.

[slowpoke]

Thanks for giving a detailed explanation, I appreciate it, and I do see some of the plus factor this adds over DOSBox.

To my personal defense: I just don't like it when people build meaningless abstractions over existing tools, and Boxers looked like just that to me at first, and I might have jumped to conclusions. I've been proven wrong and have to apologize.

[abestor]

It's worth noting that vanilla DOSBox is much, much harder to use on OS X than it is on Windows. DOSBox on OSX cannot open EXE files directly and OSX has no concept of application shortcuts: so you cannot just right-click->Open With on EXE files to launch them, or set up shortcuts for your games that pass different startup parameters to DOSBox, like you can in Windows.

Instead, to launch a game with a custom configuration file (pretty much a necessity if you have more than one game you want to play) means typing in the following lovely command in the terminal:

/Applications/DOSBox.app/Contents/MacOS/DOSBox -conf /path/to/my/game/config.conf

...each time, or learning Applescript or bash scripting in order to write your own launcher script for each game to run the appropriate commands. That, on top of learning DOSBox's config file and mount syntax so you can write the configuration files each game needs. Needless to say, this is way too much work for the majority of would-be users on the Mac, even those who have a working knowledge of MS-DOS.

Users who overcome that learning curve still have to contend with things that simply don't work at all in the DOSBox OSX build: like swapping one physical CD for another while playing (DOSBox keeps the CD busy so it can't eject, and the new CD would be at the wrong path anyway), or using fullscreen mode in OS X 10.7 (broken in DOSBox 0.74), or using Tandy emulation mode on a PowerPC mac (graphics glitches galore) or pausing the game (the default pause key doesn't exist on a Mac keyboard, and even if you rebind it the emulator will not unpause once paused) and so on and so on.

Boxer doesn't just provide added value; it provides a usable DOS emulator for the Mac in the first place.

[prehensile]

One man's meaningless layer of abstraction is another's useful tool.

Wasn't Windows just an unnecessary layer on top of DOS?

Isn't X just an unnecessary layer of abstraction over the commandline?

etc

[bane]

It actually sounds quite amazing, I'm getting it tonight for my older MBP.

Any idea if there's a windows port? Or any plans for one? It sounds like a significant improvement over dosbox...making it almost like a proper console emulator in terms of ease of use.

[abestor]

I have no plans to do a Windows port myself, as I've no interest in using or developing for Windows anymore.

I'd be delighted if someone else would have a crack at producing something Boxer-like for Windows; however, while Boxer is opensource it's written in Objective C using OS X-native APIs, so a port would involve pretty much a total rewrite of every part of Boxer that's not DOSBox. Any such project for Windows would be better off using Boxer as a source of inspiration rather than a codebase.