Discworld on OSX with Boxer

In October 2006 I wrote about ScummVM, a cross-platform emulator which lets you play such games as Simon the Sorcerer and Monkey Island.

Well the game I most wanted to play on my mac is the 1995 DOS a graphic adventure game, Discworld, based on the series of novels written by Terry Pratchett.

ScummVM have been promising to support the ‘Tinsel’ engine, as used by Discworld 1 and 2 for quite a while. In October 2005 the team reportedly got the rights to go ahead with porting the engine and are currently awaiting receipt of the source code, however three years down the line and no joy… so we have to look elsewhere.

There are other systems that let you run windows games on the mac, Wine and DOSBox are two of them. Leaving Wine for another day, DOSBox is an emulation system that lets you run play old DOS games on other, (and newer), operating systems like OS X. However, DOSBox is a pain in the arse to configure, and I was on the lookout for a graphical frontend that I could deal with. Boxer is a Mac-friendly version of the DOSBox 0.72 MS-DOS emulator, developed by Alun Bestor. So here we go with how to use Boxer to run Discworld:

• Install Boxer to your Applications folder. I’ll assume you can work this bit out yourself.
• To get the basic game files needed, you’ll need to install Discworld on a PC. Now admittedly you could argue that if you had a PC to hand, why would you want to emulate it on a mac? Well good point, so here is the folder you need. This is your main game folder, everything else will live inside it. You can keep this folder wherever you like.
• If you have the Discworld CD to hand, make a .iso image of it, using Disco or the freeware Burn application. Put the .iso file inside the game folder.
• Inside the ‘DISCWLD.CD’ you downloaded earlier make a folder called ‘DISCWLD.CD’, and inside that make one called ‘SAVE’. Quoting from my email with Alun Bestor:

This is one of the pitfalls with DOS game emulation… the games themselves sometimes have very particular ideas about where to find their files, while Boxer blithely ignores where a game is located when it runs it. In this case, even though Discworld can be installed to anywhere and run from anywhere, it always expects to find its savegames in C:\DISCWLD\SAVE. We fix the problem by creating the appropriate subfolders ourselves so that C:\DISCWLD\SAVE exists for the game.

Quick note, if you are using the Floppy Disk based version of the game you need to name the folder you just created as ‘DISCWLD’ not ‘DISCWLD.CD’.

To access the options menu in the game you need to have access to the F1 key, which OSX tends hijack to do a variety of functions, on my keyboard F1 lowers the brightness of the screen. So to get round this you need to map the the F1 function to something else:

• Startup Boxer, hold down the cmd or cloverleaf button, (next to the spacebar), and hit ‘k’, this brings up the Keyboard Mapper, it looks scary but don’t worry we will not be here long.
• Click on the ‘F1’ key in the map, it will go green. Then hit the ‘Add’ button towards the bottom of the window, red text will ask you what button you want to use, and I clicked on F5, because its a function key I’m not using for anything. Hit save the the bottom right of the screen, and quit Boxer.
• Finally, I recommend you rename the main folder you are housing the game in to ‘Discworld.boxer’, what this will do is turn the folder into a game package, which you can then just double-click on to launch the game in future. I have a folder named Games in my Applications folder, but you can put the file wherever you want.

Right, you are all set! Congratulations, and I hope you enjoy playing Discworld. I will write a followup shortly about how to get the second game in the series, Discworld II: Missing Presumed…!? working using Boxer.

My thanks to Alun Bestor who helped me in the difficult bits, if you find yourself terribly pleased about being able to run the games on your mac, please drop Alun a tip, as a way of saying thanks and to keep him developing Boxer.

Finally, I should note that Discworld is NOT freeware at the moment, so it is illegal to download the CD image. I’m providing the basic game files as they are worthless unless you have a genuine version of the game to hand.