The FreeDOS Project / News: Recent posts

If you're interested in learning a new programming language, you might be interested in XPL0. From the website: "XPL0 is essentially a cross between Pascal and C. It looks somewhat like Pascal but works more like C. It was originally created in 1976 by Peter J. R. Boyle, who designed it to run on a 6502 microprocessor as an alternative to BASIC." XPL0 is available under the GNU GPL2. More information at the XPL0 website.

MicroWeb is a web browser for DOS that runs as a 16-bit real mode application and is designed to run on minimal hardware. To run it, you will need at least an 8088 CPU, CGA/EGA/VGA/Hercules graphics, network interface, at least 640k memory. Basically, any DOS machine should run this. The latest release is version 2.1, which includes XMS memory support, simple file download support, optimized memory usage, and several bug fixes. Get it from MicroWeb 2.1 on GitHub

Victoria continues to update the FDNPKG command-line network-aware package manager. The newest release includes an updated Kitten library to support multiple languags, and now has / support so you can use more DOS-like command line options. The latest version is at FDNPKG16 releases. Please download and help with testing.

Stefan Mader created a very interesting editor that programmers may find useful: VCode is a Text/Hex-Editor and NC-like file manager for DOS. Stefan notes that it's "not yet optimized for performance or stage space" but it works well on real hardware. The editor runs in graphics mode, so you get a higher resolution, which means more lines of text. And I find it is clear enough for writing code. You can find it at VCode on GitHub

You can help test FreeDOS by downloading the monthly test release. This is a "preview" or "test" version of the FreeDOS distribution that we release every month (thanks to Jerome for making the distributions!) The monthly test releases are named like Tyymm, like T2603 for "March 2026," and contain all of the latest updates so you can see how things work together. Read the "changes.log" file to see what's changed in each test release. The big changes in T2603 include: new versions of fdnpkg16, country.sys, ldebug .. and notably, the new FreeDOS Kernel with support to run Windows 3.x. We've updated the FreeDOS Download page with a link to get the monthly test release.

Ben Collver has been working to compile the BCC compiler in 16-bit DOS. BCC is "Bruce's C Compiler," an old "barely ANSI" C compiler that produces 8086 assembler for tiny/small models. Ben recently shared versions for testing. He adds: "The 32-bit version requires HXRT to run on DOS" and "0.6.21 and 1.0.1 are both OpenWatcom builds. The compiler is too large to compile itself." Version 0.16.21 is probably the one to try, as Ben notes that "1.0.1 has a bunch of changes, some good, and others i don't trust yet. So i am keeping both copies around for now." You can find it at Ben's BCC page. We've also mirrored it on the FreeDOS Files Archive at Ibiblio under files/devel/c/bcc. Note: Ibiblio is currently running very slow.

CSMWrap is an EFI application designed to be a drop-in solution to enable legacy BIOS booting on modern UEFI-only (class 3) systems. "It achieves this by wrapping a Compatibility Support Module (CSM) build of the SeaBIOS project as an out-of-firmware EFI application, effectively creating a compatibility layer for traditional PC BIOS." That means you can boot classic operating like FreeDOS directly on newer EFI-only laptops and PCs. The developers "highly recommended that the partition table used is MBR" for compatibility. Find it at CSMwrap on GitHub. Version 2.0.0 was released in February.

The LABEL command creates, changes or deletes the volume label of a disk. Version 1.6 is a release of changes from Andrew Bird from a few years ago. It adds support in the CATS enabled version to use language specific response characters for Yes and No. Functionally it is otherwise the same as v1.5, only Open Watcom build is provided, but it still supports all previously supported compilers. You can find it at LABEL on GitHub, and the new version is the LABEL 1.6 release tag.

Victoria Crenshaw has been working on updates to FDNPKG16, a network-aware package manager for FreeDOS. Version 0.99.8253c was released last week with fixes and updates: * Updated translations. * Polished some things with the code. * Functionally should be the same as previous minor version. You can download it from the Package FDNPKG16 page on Victoria's server.

DUGL Player is a GUI video player for DOS systems, released by developer 'ffk' on February 28. The player uses external libraries LibOGG, LibVorbis and LibTheora, and supports WEBM and MPEG4. It's still in "alpha" status, and is missing several features including video sound, video seeking, detecting and handling orientation, and aspect ratio. You can find it at DOS-DUGL on GitHub.

Jemm is an "Expanded Memory Manager" (EMM), based on the source of FreeDOS emm386. Jemm386 is the standard version which needs an external eXtended Memory Manager (XMM; examples: HimemX, MS Himem, XMGR ) to be loaded, and JemmEx is the extended version which has an XMM already included. Japheth has released Jemm version 5.86, with several fixes and features. Read the details at the Jemm release page on GitHub. We've also mirrored this on the FreeDOS files archive at ibiblio, under /files/dos/emm386/jemm

The FreeDOS Kernel (kernel.sys) is the core part of FreeDOS. Jeremy Davis has been collecting changes to the FreeDOS kernel, and recently announced a new version. Jeremy writes: "I haven't had the time to have this where I'd like it to be, but there are so many improvements from others since the last release .. I recommend using the latest release (or even automatic builds from GitHub for testing)." Kernel 2044 is an incremental maintenance release with a mix of build fixes, boot/runtime edge‑case fixes, and compatibility updates. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this version, including Andrew Bird, Bernd Böckmann (boeckmann), Jeremy Davis, C. Masloch (ecm), Tee-Kiah Chia (tkchia), Sava (lpproj), Stas Sergeev (stsp), Jiri Malak (jmalak), Tom Ehlert, and others!... read more

Victoria Crenshaw has been working on updates to FDNPKG16, a network-aware package manager for FreeDOS. Victoria shared version 0.99.8253a with these updates: * fixed a bug in dumpcfg with install sources flag being inverted * httpget.exe unlinks files that fail to download * fixed a lot of copyrights headers and variable names * fdinst16.exe has multi-package install and remove features. You can download the latest version that is stable at fdnpkg16.zip {zip file} or you can try a development version {zip file}. Victoria is looking for people to test the latest version, and to suggest changes or improvements.

Ben Collver recently announced an update to the Calvin vi editor. If you like Unix vi editor, you might like Calvin. The changes in this version are key mapping: * End -- Map to $ instead of L * Home -- Map to 0 instead of H * R -- Replace mode * :previous -- edit the previous file from the argument list * { or }-- move backward or forward by paragraph. This editor requires 128K of memory, and also supports EGA 43-line and VGA 50-line modes. Get the new version from Archive.org and the source code from the Ben's Calvin repo.

Thanks to Laaca for sharing a new version of the Fontana font editor. Laaca writes: "Fontana is tool for developers. It is a bitmap font editor (with ability to import from some vector formats) which allows you to create, convert and edit fonts stored in many file formats. It shares some portions of code with my older project Kasmar which also was a font editor much simpler and with many limitations." Changes in 1.2 include: + support for unproportional (monospaced) mode + CPI archives can be saved also in WinNT subformat + default font for cp852 now contains euro symbol + overview of undefined characters in given range. You can download the new version from Laaca's website

After more than a year since the last release, there now is release 10 of lDebug (that's a small L). This is an advanced line-oriented debugger based on FreeDOS Debug/X. The new release contains some bugfixes and a few added features. It newly uses an LZEXE-based compression format for its online help pages and the packed Extension for lDebug (ELD) library. The freedos-user list has a longer announcement. Get it from the project's web page or from the FreeDOS Files Archive at ibiblio, under /dos/debug/ldebug

Calvin is a very small and fast version of the vi editor for 16-bit DOS. Ben Collver has compiled Calvin 2.4 and made it available. From Ben's note: "There is really only one change in this release: the status message from ^G now prints the current column as well as the line. The only real reason for this release is to port the source code from Borland Turbo-C and A86 to the free Watcom compiler toolchain, which is shipped with FreeDOS." Get the new version from Archive.org

Developer tkchia has shared a GCC toolchain which produces code for the (partly deprecated) x86-32 IAMCU ABI. The ABI uses registers to pass parameters to functions, and was apparently intended for use with embedded devices running on Intel Quark processors. This is currently just the GCC compiler and binutils, but not a C library runtime, so it's more of an experiment. You can find it at tkchia's codeberg site.

As part of the month of "DOScember" Jim celebrated FreeDOS by sharing several articles online. These are great starting points if you want to get into retrocomputing with FreeDOS! Check out this series of articles at All Things Open: - Why FreeDOS is a modern DOS - Turn off acceleration for the 'retrocomputing' experience - 26 essential FreeDOS commands, A to Z - Getting started with Edlin on FreeDOS - Tiny programming on FreeDOS with a kernel, shell, editor, and compiler.... read more

SuperIlu just published v0.99 of jSH, a JavaScript scripting environment for DOS. This is the 'little' text-mode brother to DOjS, released not long ago. New features in this version include: - fixed Screen object - fixed CGets() - added missing include - updated zip, mbedTLS and curl. You can find the new version at jSH on GitHub.

Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO), Team Xbox, and Activision recently announced that the classic games Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III are now released as open source software, under the MIT License. If you don't know Zork, it was an extremely popular series of text-based adventure games, released by Infocom on a variety of platforms including personal computers. You used your imagination and typed commands to navigate and take actions, with clever puzzles and world-building. Zork's Z-Machine interpreter was also a platform to create other, similar text adventure games like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You can find Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III at the Historical Source archive on GitHub.

SuperIlu has released a new version of DOjS, the javascript environment for DOS. Version 1.14.0 has several fixes and additions, but mostly for win32 users, with only a few updates for DOS users: * fixed error message for library loading in win32 * fixed SQLite3 database opening in win32 * return empty object from GetNetworkInterfaces() on win32 * fixed curl on win32 * updated zip to 0.3.5 * improved documentation * updates to libraries. Download the new release at DOjS 1.14.0 at GitHub.

In 1986 FTP Software Inc. created the PC/TCP Packet Driver specification which defined an API for sending and receiving packets over networking devices. Inside the packet driver is code to talk to a specific piece of hardware. That hardware might be a network adapter, an Ethernet chipset connected through the parallel port, or even just a plain serial port. A packet driver makes the hardware and network accessible in an easy manner. Omar Yabar has collected a ton of DOS-era packet drivers in one place, so you can easily download the one you want. Find them at the Packet Drivers Collection. We can't include these in the FreeDOS distribution because they are not open source, but we really appreciate the hard work Omar has done to collect these for DOS fans to use!

NASM is the Netwide Assembler, an open source assembler for the x86 CPU architecture, including DOS. There's a new update available now: version 3.01 mostly contains fixes such as: * The condition after %if or %elif would be evaluated while output is suppressed after %exitrep or %exitmacro * Fix encoding of TCVTROWPS2PHL * The unofficial but obvious alternate form TEST reg,mem was not accepted by NASM 3.00 * A new %selbits() preprocessor function and command line option * Define additional permissive patterns and fix several opcode bugs * Fix parsing of two-operand forms of x87 instructions * And other fixes. See the NASM documentation for more. Download the new version from the official releasebuilds 3.01

FreeDOS developer 'sparky4' has been working on an updated version of the FreeDOS package manager, FDNPKG16, which runs as a 16-bit program. There's a new release to try out, here are the release notes (slightly edited for readability): "Merged fdnpkg16 and fdnpkg86 to one program that uses httpget externally. too many issues with them separate and running like before. The older fdnpkg16 will eat memory and you cannot install hundreds of packages when it eats memory (6400) every time it called httpget, so I call it in an external simple program. Note: this does break international support for that particular area. There's a problem in fdnpkg86 with downloading files - on my recently acquired Toshiba T1200 system, it just takes too long, like over 2 hours for it to fail. But this should work now on all systems with more than 480kB of memory." You can get the latest version at FDNPKG16 releases on GitHub or more directly from FDNPKG16 ver. 0.99.8249.