Boxer for Mac now ships with the Ultima Underworld demo
Boxer, for those who don’t know the name, is a Mac port of DOSBox that claims to vastly simplify the process of playing DOS games using that software.
Having used it, I’d say that this is a reasonably truthful statement; I particularly like how it allows you to launch DOS apps off of your drive simply by double-clicking the EXE file. It can also be used to “wrap” (“box”, natch) individual games, which you can then treat as a standard Mac app for all intents and purposes.
That said, Boxer wasn’t this cool when last I downloaded it:
Boxer comes with 4 ready-to-play DOS games to whet your appetite: Commander Keen 4 and demos of Epic Pinball, Ultima Underworld and X-COM: UFO Defense. Bon appetit!
Ultima Underworld!
Yes, yes, just the demo. But still! It’s always great to see a classic get its due.
Do be sure to give the Boxer website’s main page a thorough look-over; Ultima Underworld isn’t the only Origin game they mention or provide a screenshot of.
Not to be picky, but Boxer has actually bundled the Ultima Underworld demo for about 2 years now – ever since it was a wee lad at version 0.8 (it’s now at 1.0.) There’s also Ultima IV available for download separately from the Boxer website, complete with manuals and map: http://boxerapp.com/games.
I’d really like to offer the full UW1, as it was one of my all-time favourites and a formative experience for me, but Boxer has to maintain a policy of not distributing commercial software.
Alun: Ah, that would be the issue then. It would seem that the last version of Boxer I downloaded was v0.7.
I will make a note about the Ultima 4 package, though. That’s cool. Thanks for the tip!
By the way: I totally get the frustration. I’d release all the Ultima games here on the site if I could…but this site needs to maintain that same policy. I’ll only distribute what I legally can.
Looks epic, need to download and try on my mac :).
I was wondering what you were talking about since I remembered seeing the demo with boxer as well, when I tried it some time ago.
Ultimately I found Boxer not my thing, mostly because I’m used to running dosbox on my own with a couple of config files. Also I’m often buidling Dosbox from SVN.
But it looked quite good and I don’t want to make it sound bad 🙂