Boxer cannot import games on PC booter disk images

[alinebee]

(This is a tracking issue/googlebait for a current limitation of Boxer, one which comes up frequently in my inbox.)

Some older DOS games came on self-booting floppy disks, commonly called "PC booters". DOSBox – and thus Boxer – can boot from images of those disks to play those games. However, Boxer's game import process does not recognise PC booter disk images and will complain that they are corrupt or incomplete.

To get a PC booter game working in Boxer, you'll need to make a gamebox for it by hand:

1. Put the game's disk image into a new empty folder.
2. Rename this folder to Title of Game.boxer to convert it into a gamebox.
3. Doubleclick on the gamebox to launch it in Boxer, then quit immediately after launching. (This creates a new configuration file inside the gamebox, which we need to edit.)
4. Right-click on the gamebox and choose "Show package contents" to look inside it again.
5. Doubleclick on DOSBox Preferences.conf to open it in TextEdit.
6. Paste the following line under the [autoexec] heading, then save the file: boot "filename of disk image.img"
7. Doubleclick on the gamebox to launch it again. The game should now boot up automatically.

[alinebee]

The plan is to add native support for PC booter images into a future version of Boxer, such that:

• Boxer will automatically boot from any PC booter image it finds inside a gamebox, bypassing the usual program-launching nonsense.
• Dropping a PC booter image onto the import window will create a new gamebox containing just that image.
• Dropping a PC booter image onto a DOS window will boot directly from that image.
• Boxer Bundler will accept gameboxes that contain a bootable disk image. (At the moment, it will reject any game that does not have launch options.)