It was a lot of fun to get together online last time - so let's do it again! Mark your calendars for Sunday, December 13 at 11am US/Central. Use your favorite timezone converter to find your local time. Just like last time, we'll hold the meeting via BlueJeans. I use BlueJeans for my online training business, so I already have things set up there. You can download the BlueJeans Meetings client, or connect from your browser without a client. There's no link yet - I'll share the meeting link on December 13 when the get-together starts.

Fritz just published version 1.0.8 of the FreeDOS Help. Fritz added: "Lorenzo del Toro Saravia translated the help to Spanish, and Berki Yenigün translated the help to French. So FreeDOS Help supports 4 languages now! This is a great work as the FreeDOS Help now has almost 290 HTML files per language! Great job Lorenzo and Berki!" And thanks to everyone who helped make this updated FreeDOS Help - this makes FreeDOS easier to use! You can find the new FreeDOS Help 1.0.8 on the FreeDOS files archive at ibiblio, under files/dos/help/

Jemm386 is an Expanded Memory Manager for DOS. Japheth released an update to version 5.79 last week. Changes in this version include bugfixes (like if physical address of DMA buffer was beyond 16M, or shrinking an EMB) and other updates including default linker is now JWlink, Jemm will now use info returned by Int 15h, ax=E820h to mark regions in the upper memory area as reserved, and VME (virtual mode extensions) is now off by default. You can find it on the Releases page for the Jemm GitHub.

Japheth also shared a new v5.8 prerelease. This version now provides an extended Int 15h, ah=87h emulation that allows HimemSX to access up to 1 TB in v86-mode. This refers to HimemSX, an extended memory manager (XMM) implementing XMS v3.5. The SX in HimemSX stands for "Super-eXtended" and can manage more than 4 GB of memory.

I've been recording videos for the FreeDOS YouTube Channel. If you haven't checked out the channel lately, you might be interested in several gameplay videos, including Star Wars TIE Fighter + flying the TIE Defender, a demo of the Brix puzzle game, and a full playthrough of the shareware DOOM episode. You can also find lots of "how-to" videos, like how to set up FreeDOS as an embedded system, how to install FreeDOS manually, and how to make a minimal FreeDOS. And I like to explore other DOS topics and classic applications, including Borland's Mercury and WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS. If you'd like a bit of history, also check out my history of MS-DOS 1981-1995 or my recent conference talk about Why DOS Was (and Is) a Thing. I release new videos every week! You can stay up to date on new videos by subscribing to the channel, and click the bell icon to get notified when I post new videos.

You may remember Microsoft released the GW-BASIC source code on GitHub, in May this year. And since then, several developers have been updating the code to get it to assemble. One project is tkchia's GW-BASIC GitHub project to adjust GW-BASIC to assemble with JWASM or other assemblers. You can now find a new release of GW-BASIC, also on GitHub. The notes mention that this is a "pre-release" binary of GW-BASIC as rebuilt in 2020, and that support for serial port I/O is missing. Light pen input, joystick input, and printer (parallel port) output need more testing.