After installing Boxer, dig up a copy of your favorite old DOS game that’s supported by DOSBox. Copy the files into a folder on your Mac (you do still have a 5.25″ floppy drive, right?). Start up Boxer and drag-and-drop the folder where indicated. That’s it.

Drag-and-drop your games here to install.

If the game needs to run and install or setup program, Boxer will give you a chance to do either before starting the game. Boxer even comes pre-bundled with Commander Keen 4 and demos of Epic Pinball, Ultima Underworld, and X-COM: UFO Defense. There are additional pre-packaged demo games you can download separately as well.

For recreating the video arcade game experience on the PC, MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is the standard. It works by recreating the hardware circuitry of older arcade machines and loading the game software within this emulated environment. Everything from the CPU, video, sound, and RAM chips is emulated. Under MAME, a wide variety of arcade machines are emulated, from the old Williams machines that ran Joust to the newer CPS3 systems that run the Street Fighter III series. Emulation support for new systems is also added from time to time.

While the official release of MAME is built for Windows, various other flavors of MAME are released for a variety of platforms. One such flavor is SDLMAME, which is easy to build in just about any *NIX environment that supports the SDL library. Another feature of SDLMAME is that it follows the official MAME releases closely: updates to MAME are quickly added to SDLMAME.

Of course, recreating the arcade circuitry is only part of reliving the video arcade gaming experience. The controls are a large part was well. One available controller is the X-Arcade Dual Joystick. The X-Arcade controllers are solidly built with the same parts used to build many arcade controllers. By default, the X-Arcade joysticks are pre-configured for use with MAME with the controller’s buttons mapped to the MAME default keys right out of the box. There are also adapters available for the X-Arcade controllers so you can use them with your Dreamcast, Xbox, and PS2/3 systems in addition to your PC. While not strictly required to play games with MAME, it greatly enhances the experience.

In addition to the hardware, the software from arcade machines is also required to reproduce gameplay. Arcade machines typically store their programs in on-board ROM chips with some newer systems utilizing hard-disk drives or CDROMs. Hobbyists “dump” games from on-board ROMs into files that can be loaded into MAME for play. Games stored in hard-drives and CDROMs are dumped into CHDs, which stands for “compressed hard-drive image” and can also be loaded into MAME for play. Groups of dumped games packaged together are known as a “romset”.

The MAME project maintains a list of dumped games that represent the supported MAME romset. Note that not all games in the MAME romset are working, but are included in case future releases can support them. A great resource about this romset is MAWS, which lists information about all games in the MAME romset in a searchable and browsable interface.

This concludes part 1 of this article. Part 2 (coming soon) will cover how to built and install MAME on your Linux box.

I picked up the Android-powered G1 late last week. I like the phone quite a bit. Here’s a list of things about Android that stood out to me this past weekend, both good and bad.

• When you boot up the phone for the first time, it asks you for your Google account login. If you don’t have one, it will make you create a Google account. There is no doubt that this is a Google phone through and through. Oddly, when I entered my password incorrectly, it claimed to have network access problems rather than reporting bad login credentials. I tried to log in about a half dozen times before I realized I was entering the wrong password.
• There are two email clients on the phone: the Gmail client and a secondary email client for POP and IMAP access. The Gmail client is on par with the Gmail client that I had on my Blackberry 8100. However, the POP/IMAP client leaves quite a bit to be desired. Setting up an IMAP account is easy, but there are a couple things missing from the client. For example, while the total number of unread messages for an IMAP account is displayed, the number of unread messages per folder is not.
• I love the notification bar. Incoming emails, SMS text messages, IM messages are all slipped into a notification area at the top part of the screen. When they first appear, a quick preview of the message is also displayed on the bar. With a quick flick of the finger to pull down this bar, I am given one click access to these messages.
• Instead of using a numeric passcode to lock the phone, the G1 features a neat alternative. The “passcode” is a pattern drawn on a 3-by-3 grid. The phone is unlocked by drawing the matching pattern with my finger on the touchscreen.
• By sliding my finger along the desktop, I can switch between three desktop spaces. Shortcuts to commonly used applications can be placed on these desktop spaces. Applications are stored in a drawer that is opened by flicking on a tab upwards from the bottom of the screen.
• For better and worse, contacts are automatically synced from your Gmail contacts list. Gmail had harvested a good number of contacts from my email, so I had to do a good deal of clean up to keep my G1 contact list less cluttered.
• Up to six applications can be run at the same time. However, as far as I can tell, there is no way to explicitly close an application. As you open more, they are closed in a first-open-first-closed fashion. As my girlfriend noted, you can open the browser, switch to another application, then switch back to the browser without having to wait for the URL to load again (as is the case with the iPhone).
• The trackball is pretty useful when in the horizontal, keyboard-flipped out orientation. It helps me navigate through text input fields without moving my fingers up to the touchscreen. Also, keyboard shortcuts. Nuff’ said.
• Frequently accessed settings like enabling/disabiling wifi are buried a few levels deep in a Settings application. Fortunately, the AnyCuts application available in the Android Market makes it possible to place a shortcut to just about anything on the desktop.

All in all, I think the G1 is a good debut for the Android platform. There are a few interface quirks, but as in the case with AnyCuts, the open nature of the platform and the Android Market are already encouraging the development of solutions. I think this is promising and there is a lot of potential for the Android platform.

P.S. Someone please make a BART schedule application before I am forced to foist a half-assed one upon the Android world.