MiniMax wrote:

Ups - Sorry IIGS_User, small error in my code-example. Try

$ file some-image-file.img

Thank you, I'll try that 😅

Boxer 0.65 now recognizes .CUE images. These never had a UTI to start with, so I've had Boxer assign them com.goldenhawk.cdrwin-cuesheet according to the recommended UTI naming conventions (CDRwin was the program that introduced cuesheets, and goldenhawk.com is the website of the company which created it.) This UTI isn't authoritative though, and someone else could come along and claim .CUEs for themselves with a completely different UTI. I haven't checked out Toast for instance, to see if it has declared any UTIs for these other image formats.

IMGs already have the authoritative UTI com.apple.disk-image-ndif - which refers to a completely unrelated Apple image format that used the IMG extension, and which is now pretty obsolete. There's no way to differentiate an Apple IMG from a Bochs IMG by filetype, so as Minimax suggests one can either grep the output of FILE or just accept all IMGs and let DOSBox reject ones it doesn't recognise.

I wasn't suggesting grep'ing the output from file. file does its detection-magic using .... a text file called magic with signatures for different file types. Boxer (and other frontends) should be able to do the same time of detection (e.g. look for at particular set of bytes at a given offset in the file).

I checked some img files with the file command, here are some results:
Frontends can proceed with the resulting msg. They can use the characteristics given in the result, like "x86 boot sector", "sectors", sectors/FAT", "FAT (12 bit)", "bootable", "label: " and others...
😀

Vigil wrote:

Boxer 0.65 now recognizes .CUE images...

At all, that's an very interesting part, described on your site: 😎

Or, Make the game into a game package. Just rename the game’s folder to add .boxer to the end, and you’ll be able to double-click on the folder to launch the game.

IIGS_User, it looks like you have Roxio Toast installed - could you attach or email me its Info.plist file? I want to look at its filetype associations, to see if it has defined its own UTIs or OSTypes for CUE and other image formats.

(Unfortunately there's no demo version of Toast, so I can't just download it and see for myself...)

If you want to support importing the Boxer package format into a different frontend, it should be pretty easy: a Boxer package is just a regular game folder with the .boxer extension. A package may also contain a DOSBox Preferences.conf file with game-specific settings, and a symlink named DOSBox Target which points to the main EXE/COM/BAT file for the game.

IIGS_User, it looks like you have Roxio Toast installed[/quote]
Yes, I have. See PM...

Vigil wrote:

If you want to support importing the Boxer package format into a different frontend, it should be pretty easy: a Boxer package is just a regular game folder with the .boxer extension. A package may also contain a DOSBox Preferences.conf file with game-specific settings, and a symlink named DOSBox Target which points to the main EXE/COM/BAT file for the game.

About the other part, good informations and a very interesting offer.

Another problem I'd like to bring up with regards to the Mac DOSBox port:

It's really hard to find an OS X player or plugin for the ZMBV codec (which DOSBox uses for movies) and there's no guidance in the DOSBox readme on how to do so. VLC has just added support for the codec in 0.9.0, but that version hasn't been officially released yet. MPlayer supposedly supports it too, but neither of these players actually mention doing so on their websites - which substantially reduces the chance of a user finding a suitable player for it in a search.

So, it would be really good to give details in the DOSBox readme on Why Your Movies Don't Work and where to download players for OS X that can handle this codec. At the moment there's not even a mention there of what the codec is.

However, it would be even better to choose a more widely-known codec for the Mac version, one which Quicktime supports out of the box or can find plugins for. I know there are reasons why the ZMBV codec was chosen - such as lossless compression - but there are other lossless alternatives that might be better-supported, and in any case a lossy-compressed movie is still better than a movie you cannot view at all.

(Edit: after reading more, it sounds like the ZMBV codec was developed by the DOSBox team. If this is the case then I'm very impressed! And rather than switching to some other codec, I'd suggest creating a Quicktime plugin for distribution with DOSBox itself. I realise that's sort of a "well why not do it yourself" request, but I know absolutely buggerall about video and suspect that it's not a common skillset among other developers either.)

This is an OSX community issue, not a DOSBox issue.

There is no reason to mention in the readme on 'Why Your Movies Don't Work" since the movies work fine. It's the OS that has the issue because it doesn't have a media player with the codec to read the movie.

Why bother to only mention media players for OSX to play the movies that DOSBox records where in Windows the codec that comes with DOSBox enables ALL media players that uses that codec to be able to play DOSBox movies.

The DOSBox codec was chosen because it offers the least CPU usage and the highest video quality for recording DOS games. Lossy compression results in too much CPU overhead and there's no reason to introduce more codecs because the OSX community is too slow/sparse to support a codec that has been around for 2+ years....

So tell VLC to get their butts into gear and release the latest ver of VLC for OSX or tell Apple to support ZMBV in their POS QuickTime program.

Why bother to only mention media players for OSX to play the movies that DOSBox records where in Windows the codec that comes with DOSBox enables ALL media players that uses that codec to be able to play DOSBox movies.

The Windows release of DOSBox includes a plugin that allows all media players to play the ZMBV codec, along with written instructions on how to use it.

The mac release has no such plugin, and no such instructions on how to deal with movies they can't play. In short they get absolutely no information at all.

Users do not CARE whose "problem" it is that none of the players they have support the codec that DOSBox uses, what users care about is that they get videos they can't play. DOSBox is the program making the videos, and seeing as how the DOSBox project apparently even created the codec in question, it's DOSBox's responsibility to explain how to use it.

In the absence of a similar plugin to what Windows users already get (and, apparently, take for granted), the best way to help out Mac users in the meantime would be for DOSBox to give links to players that support the codec - whether in the main Readme or in a separate one specific to the Mac release. Until this happens, the next version of Boxer will pick up the slack by giving those links itself.

In passing, Microsoft did not write the ZMBV plugin for Windows, and they certainly didn't build in official support into their media player for it. So why do you expect Apple to do so with Quicktime, as if every cottage format is automatically the problem of every OS and every media player? This is what plugin architectures are designed for: so that developers can add support for their own formats into popular applications. Quicktime has plugins too.

Vigil wrote:

VLC has just added support for the codec in 0.9.0, but that version hasn't been officially released yet. MPlayer supposedly supports it too, but neither of these players actually mention doing so on their websites

One day, I'm sure, they're coming... 😉

it's DOSBox's responsibility to explain how to use it.

No.
If you feel it's missing, add it and post a patch at the sourceforge page.
Other than that nobody of us cares as we don't use macs.

Very well, I'll submit patches for the issues I am able to fix. I was operating under the assumption that the MacOS port was actively maintained by developers; had I known that nobody cares about it then I wouldn't have wasted my time writing bug reports.

If you have updates to the readme/docs/whatever just post them here or at sourceforge.

Vigil wrote:

Very well, I'll submit patches for the issues I am able to fix. I was operating under the assumption that the MacOS port was actively maintained by developers; had I known that nobody cares about it then I wouldn't have wasted my time writing bug reports.

As usual, it's a problem of Mac users. 😉
(knowing reduced Mac versions of PC software for years now)

The last I created a db movie by FN+ctrl+ALT+F5 (creating an *.avi container), and all what I get was a rush noise w/white background graphics. First I tried "Windows Media Player for Mac", second the QuickTime Player (which should the point of choice).

QuickTime Player recognized "Quicktime needs additional software..." with a link to downloadable QuickTime component software: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/resources/components.html

QuickTime components wrote:

With QuickTime’s open architecture, third-party developers can create components, or plug-ins to QuickTime. These third-party components expand the functionality of QuickTime, allowing QuickTime to play additional media types.

So if a Mac crack knows the zmbv format he should be able to develop a Quicktime component part (me=excluded).

Vigil wrote:

Very well, I'll submit patches for the issues I am able to fix. I was operating under the assumption that the MacOS port was actively maintained by developers; had I known that nobody cares about it then I wouldn't have wasted my time writing bug reports.

that is not entirely true. You are overexagorating.
We are just limited in our understanding about a mac.

and for codecs we do believe that it's for the os itself to cope with that.
ffmpeg has the zmbv codec for a long time. So we assume that all platforms have acces to it.
For windows we distribute a dll, but we might remove that in the future as well.

Well if the nightly Intel OS X builds for VLC were compiling, I would say download one of those:

http://nightlies.videolan.org/

But they aren't so I can't. Question: When I compile a custom version of DOSBox, what libraries are required in order for my custom version to have ZMBV recording support?

For now at least, MPlayer 1.0rc1 will play them back and has the advantage of being released and supported. Actually I was able to get the VLC PowerPC nightly to play back ZMBV movies - this version will still run on Intel macs, just slower because the PowerPC emulation kicks in. I tried the latest backup of the Intel nightlies (from December) but it wouldn't play them back.

Unfortunately Quicktime does not offer builtin support for hardly anything - you still need to download plugins to play back WMV or DivX for instance - and Apple doesn't seem in a hurry to expand its support for popular formats, let alone obscure ones. I don't hope for out-of-the-box OS-level support for these movies any time soon.

In the long run I think the solution that would benefit the most users would be for a Mac video wiz to contribute ZMBV support to Perian, which is the major Quicktime codec project. [EDIT: Perian even uses bits of ffmpeg, but apparently not enough to have brought support for this codec.] That would increase the chance that the videos would work out-of-the-box, without a user having to download additional players or plugins. The ZMBV codec itself seems to be well-documented enough on the DOSBox wiki, so the problem is finding a Mac programmer who knows how to proceed with that data.

Sorry for my earlier impatience - I realise it's impossible for the DOSBox team to directly support a platform none of you are able to run, I'd just assumed until now that there was a mac developer on the team.

Can a Mac OS X user tell me what
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail& … &group_id=52551
Is all about ?

OS X has a parental controls system that allows an administrator to select which applications a user account is allowed to access. When setting the parental controls for a user account, all applications (be they in the Applications folder or elsewhere) are displayed in a list with checkboxes beside each for the administrator to enable/disable access. I have tested this in 10.5, and the DOSBox application shows up in this list and can be enabled and disabled as appropriate - and this will correctly allow or prevent launching it in the restricted account.

The parental controls system also allows you to turn on a simplified OS interface mode called "Simple Finder": in this mode, the user can only see their documents folder and the applications they have access to. However, DOSBox does not show up in this simplified interface even when DOSBox has been enabled for the account, and this is probably the problem the bug reporter is talking about.

Other applications are correctly added to/removed from this interface when they are enabled/disabled, so it appears that something in DOSBox's application metadata is making it behave differently and preventing it from appearing in the available applications. I haven't worked out what that is yet though.