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Nostalgia is a thing of the past. Whats better than to play all of your favourite DOS games on your Mac. You can with a beautiful new program called Boxer. In a nutshell it is a DOS emulator (written in Apple Script by all means) that can emulate DOS and let your play your favourite DOS games. By the looks and feel of things it can also run other DOS programs. Pretty neat. Best of all this program is free. This short review will look into how the program works and how you can use it.

Don Your Gloves

Boxer app is an emulator. But there is a lot more to this program than an emulator. I can’t warm enough to how good this program is. What need need when you run this program is the program itself and a game. There are a couple included, although a quick Google search will bring up hundreds of results where you can download nearly every game imaginable.

There is 3 apps to this program, if that makes sense. There is Boxer which is the emulator, this is the program that is used to run the DOS programs. There is the DOS prompt, which is similar to an actual DOS prompt although it has been slightly tweaked to run on a Mac, as well as this I am sure it accepts some Unix prompts. Finally there is the package builder which takes your .exe and builds it into a package. There is also a couple of other programs on the Boxer website which can be used to extend the program.

Once you drag and drop the program into your Applications folder, the app will generate a special folder in your home directory, this is where you place you DOS applications and is the home of a couple of extra files and folders. When you are ready to play you simple double click on the game and boxer will launch. You then be thrown into application. There isn’t an actual interface for the program, you have to run a game or DOS program.

The program runs very fast. It uses about 50% CPU usage although it will vary depending on the DOS application used. You can then use the program as if it was a normal DOS prompt, you can click, move the mouse and do all of the normal things. One funny “feature” of using such a powerful computer to a simple application such as Pac Man made for computers years old, is that they run very fast. Characters can whizz around the board simply because the computer runs so fast.

Conclusion

This program is really well written. Although it is built on Apple Script (which slows it down a little) it seems to perform flawlessly. This program could easily be buggy and slowly, thankfully Boxer isn’t. As well as this there is also a good website to back this program up. It gives quite a few details on how to use the program as well as some of the extra features. I could easily see this program become a paid application in the future.

There are a couple of draw backs to this game. For example you have to find your own DOS games, which is a slight annoyance but one you expect. There are some sample games to keep you going. As well as this it does tend to put quite a few files on your system which can become a bit cluttered after a while.

Definitely check it out, even if it is just for a couple of minutes.

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