Boxer - DOS games emulator for Mac OSX

Ever miss the classic DOS games of the 90's in the Windows era? Well, if you own a Mac, you can still play those classics on your machine.

Remember the first person shooters like Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D or the side strollers like Bio Menace, Dangerous Dave, Prince of Persia, Aladdin or Lion King?

Well if you loved playing the above games, then BOXER is definitely the app for you. Period. Oh and by the way, it has nothing to do with boxing :)

Boxer is a beautiful DOS games emulator for Macs which is basically powered by the DosBox's emulation at its core.

DosBox can be separately installed on Mac, but many users might find it confusing and tricky to install it through Terminal. Boxer saves you those hassles. You don't need the technical expertise to run commands on the command line. All you have to do is download Boxer and the DOS games.

Now, if you're wondering where to find good old DOS games, please check out the following links :

DOS Games Archive

Liberated Games

Good Old Games

DosGames

Here's a quick simple walkthrough to use Boxer :

Once, downloaded simply open it to view the welcome screen.

Then go to any of the above DOS games sites and download the game. It usually might be a zip file.

Unzip it and click "Import a new game".

Now, all you have to do drag and drop the unzipped game folder into the dotted square as seen above. This will initiate the importing process. If the game has Install.exe as its installation program, it will be automatically selected at this stage.

Let's take an example of the Apogee Software's Bio Menace. You'll see the following screen once you drag-n-drop the unzipped folder. 

It will automatically select the Install.exe. You just have to click "Launch Installer". In the next screen you'll see the actual installation process, as it would have happened on a DOS prompt.

In most cases, you just have to follow the default steps in general, to proceed with the installation.

The screen below shows that the games has been imported successfully and is ready to be played on your Mac.

At this stage, you can drag and drop any image or cover art for the game, to make it look attractive and identifiable on your game shelf. 

Now, click "Launch Game". Sit back, relax and start playing :)

This emulator is similar to the Wine wrapper used to play Windows games on Mac OSX or Linux. 

Also, if you click the Display tab in Boxer's preferences, you choose the type of rendering style as seen below. 

Ok guys, am sipping on some Pepsi before the action begins. It's time to play Snake Logan and start shooting the dirty filthy alien monsters. Aaaaah I so feel like it's the 90's again :)

Bbye !

Hardcode subtitles using Handbrake - Apple OSX

If you're a movie buff like me and watch a lot of non-english, foreign language movies, you must be coming across the headache to find english subtitles.

Although you can google and download the subtitles file ( .srt files ), it can be quite convenient to permanently hardcode the subtitles to the video. A very good app to do so is known as Handbrake

Although the main purpose of Handbrake is to transcode video into different formats, it is also useful to hardcode a .srt file to a video.

A sample screenshot is shown below :

As you see, you can simply choose a video by clicking Source. Then click the subtitles tab at bottom and click "Add External SRT" to choose the .srt file.

Once selected, just choose the Output format and click Start to encode. After it's done, you see a funny popup like this :)

Free up memory (RAM) in Mac OSX

While using Mac OSX at times you feel may some application is eating up too much memory, whereby the system performs too slowly. If you observe any noticeable lag in the performance, chances are a lot of memory RAM is being used up and the free RAM is too low.

In such a case, open the Terminal and type the following:

purge

This will free up a lot of used or inactive RAM.

In fact in order to check the exact figures, open the Activity Monitor from the Utilities. Then click the System Memory tab from bottom. Compare the figures of Used and Free Memory before and after running the purge command. You'll see that the Free Memory stats shoot up drastically, thereby improving the performance.

Show file extensions in Mac OSX

People new to Mac OSX often ask how do I see a file's extension, since by default the extensions are hidden. In order to view the extensions, do the following:

• Open any finder window or just click anywhere on the desktop.

• From the topmost Finder menu, click Preferences.

• Click the Advanced tab in the Finder Preferences.

• Tick mark the "Show all filename extensions" 

Safari 6 for OSX Lion - Buggy, Problematic

Why why why Apple did you "upgrade" Safari to actually downgrade it??

Safari v5.x was so nice previously and worked so smoothly.

Ever since its upgraded to v.6.1.1 on my OSX 10.7.5, its performance has sharply downgraded. It stops responding on certain websites. It eats up big chunks of memory. 

The previous cinematic most-visited Top Sites page was so tasteful than the now-simplified straight lines rectangular crap.

When you toggle between windowed and fullscreen, Safari usually tends to hang or stop working or you see the spinning wheel running forever.

Why have you changed the Bookmarks section? Previously it was so organized and helpful with the screenflow. Damn you apple and your android-y simple designs. 

Safari these days is so irritating, I've switched to Chrome for good.

For simple designs customers should buy cheap chromebooks, why the premium Apple should stoop down to cheapo level? Bring back the zing, the color than using the current stupid simplistic designs... End of rant

Fresh new electronic music on my iPod Playlist

Here are some new additions to my iPod playlist :

Ghostpoet - Cold Win (Special Request Remix)

Current Value - Megalomania

Mount Kimbie - CSFLY Remixes

Marco Bailey - Faint Hope

Klangstabil - Shadowboy

Piemont - Off to Drink

OSX - Indian Rupee Symbol

For Indian users using, Mac OSX, here's a quick tip for saving the Indian Rupee ₹ symbol as a shortcut.

1. Go to System Preferences -> Language & Text
2. Then click the Text tab next to language
3. Click the + button from bottom to add a new shortcut
4. Type (INR or inr or Rs) under the Replace column and type the equivalent ₹ symbol under the With column

Check the following screenshot for reference

Now open up TextEdit and type INR and it will automatically replace it with the ₹ symbol.

OSX Terminal Clear Screen

A lot of pro Windows users when switching to a Mac, often find it difficult to get rid of their old habits.

One of those habits happen to be clear screen (CLS) in the DOS prompt. But on a Mac, when you fire up a terminal window and type a few commands, you usually tend to type CLS later to clear the clutter. And you are are like Oh boy! how in the world do I clear the screen? :) when you see the error [ -bash: cls: command not found ]

Here's a quick tip: Just remember to type Command+K to clear the screen.

Macbook Pro Battery Tips

• Macbook Pro is one of the few laptops that have had the best battery performance in my opinion. Having used Dell and HP laptops loaded with Windows OS, in the past, it was evident how quickly the battery runs out of juice. Macbook Pro's on the other hand has had really good battery performance. I've heard that the Macbook Air has much better battery performance.

• However, ever since Apple released the OSX Mavericks free upgrade, a lot of users have complained about battery issues. Infact the hullabaloo about battery issues is so loud, that I've refrained from upgrading to Mavericks even if it's free. As a matter of fact, if you see the 200+ feature list for the upgrade, you'll notice that a majority of 'new' features are useless. So instead, I just upgraded the Safari browser along with the other regular app updates. However, ever since Safari was updated to v6.1 even my battery drains out quite fast. I have a feeling that the Safari browser is a lot buggier than its previous versions and tends to max out the CPU and memory consumption - thereby draining out battery much faster.

• Inorder to keep a track on the battery shelf life I've started to use an app called Coconut Battery. Its a small little utility to monitor the battery statistics. One good feature I liked about it is you can save data on various dates and keep a track on the charge cycles. My 15" MBP is more than 2 yrs old and has had close to 200 cycles by now. As per Apple's support article, my model supports a max cycle count of 1000.

• I also read somewhere that the battery performance usually gets deteriorated due to overheating. Overheating happens when you run multiple apps which use system resources heavily. So it would help to keep a check on the battery temperatures as well. Deteriorating batteries tend to bloat and bulge thereby affecting the internals. You can check some apple discusiion forums about the same here.

• You can also calibrate the battery by going powerless once in a while and allow the battery to completely drain out. Then let the laptop cool for some time. Once cooled down, plugin the power cord and restart again.