[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