Viggles: I'm the developer of Boxer, and thought I'd weigh in with my thoughts on bundling commercial DOS games for distribution to Macs.
Firstly, Boxer is a much better starting-point for this than DOSBox, for reasons that will hopefully be apparent to anyone who gives
Boxer 0.9 a try.
That said, Boxer's game package format is not an appropriate way for GOG to release games, were they to add Mac support. A game package is inert and unusable until Boxer is present on the user's system, and it's currently not possible to cleanly bundle Boxer with a game (like GOG does now with DOSBox) without Boxer creating extraneous support folders (which are irrelevant to a single-game emulation scenario) and generally acting like a separate application.
The ideal way to release a DOS game for Mac would be a DMG enclosing a self-contained OS X .app, bearing the name and box art of that game. This .app would simply be a customised, stripped-down version of the Boxer application itself, with the game files stored inside the application bundle. This version would need to replace the Boxer branding with that of the game, and discard all of Boxer's extra functionality to focus only on emulating that particular game.
Such a version of Boxer does not yet exist. But, it would be quite practical for me to make it exist were there a demand, and I am very happy to work with any company that wants such a thing to exist for their own distributions. So, should GOG ever change its policy on Mac support, please get in touch.
Welcome Viggles! Glad to have you on board!
Honestly, I don't think it'd be
that hard to make people download Boxer onto their Macs if they didn't run that on their systems already. Maybe make that as part of a *.DMG file where you can install Boxer as well when you first install a game from GOG if you don't have Boxer on your system already.
BTW, I've been playing with the new Boxer build. Man, that is a major improvement! Great job!
And since I have Boxer already, I'd love to have regular Boxer *.app files of the DOS games on GOG as part of my DOS Games folder! That might be a perfect way to play with Teenagent and any other DOS games (like the first Oddworld, the Fallout games, etc.) that I'd get on GOG.
I'm happy with the Windows games however they choose to do it, however; whether they work with Apple & Microsoft to come up with an emulation layer for GOG.com apps or whether they port it over themselves, I really don't care how, I'd love to have full Mac support, but that's a pipe dream for now (although they might make that sort of announcement at E3...).
BJ
