XMGR, UIDE, UHDD/UDVD2 and RDISK are open source DOS device drivers for a PC system with an 80386+ CPU and using FreeDOS. XMGR is an "XMS manager" for up to 4-GB. UIDE is a disk caching driver. UHDD is an improved disk-only caching driver. UDVD2 is a CD/DVD driver for up to 4 SATA, IDE, or old PIO-mode drives. RDISK is a RAM-disk driver. Jack Ellis has updated the drivers. From the readme: "UIDE now updated with all UHDD updates and 'bug fixes' from 15-Feb-2019 onward. It now offers 10-MB and all 20-MB+ cache sizes for old small-memory systems. UHDD fixed to run 9 controllers and "LBA48" disks (> 128-GB) correctly. It now does Read-Ahead with all 10-MB+ caches. See the driver .ASM source files for full notes on these changes." We've mirrored this release at ibiblio as drivers-2020-07-07.zip

Senet is a very old board game for two players, dating back to ancient Egypt. The game is simple to play, and requires a combination of luck and strategy. I've written a version of Senet for FreeDOS, called Simple Senet. As you might guess from the name, the game rules are simplified. Historians differ on the exact rules, but I prefer to play using a variation of the most common rule set. I hope you enjoy this game too! Simple Senet is available under the GNU GPL v2. You can find it on SourceForge or download the latest DOS exe and source code - mirrored at ibiblio.

In May, I mentioned that I was planning to consolidate the web traffic for FreeDOS to a single place. We had a lot of places for people to go online, and it was spreading the communication channels too thin, so it was difficult to find people. As part of that site consolidation, I have archived the FreeDOS Blog from Blogger, and moved it to freedos.org/blog. I've made the Blogger version invisible. Right now, the updated blog is just a static archive. There's no search (yet) to help find specific items, but I plan to add that.

I don't often use the FreeDOS Blog. Earlier this year, I had started linking to our FreeDOS videos on YouTube, but that was the most I'd used the blog in a while. I plan to use the blog if I need to write about something that's very long (longer than will fit in a regular news item) and then I'll link to it as a news item on the front page so you can find it.

This is a monthly update on a project I've been working on. For the last two months, I've posted weekly videos to the FreeDOS channel on YouTube, helping new programmers to learn C. If you've ever wanted to learn C programming, check out this series! Along the way, I've been writing a C programming guide for my Patreon backers. Things have pretty much wrapped up, and I'm planning to release Writing FreeDOS Programs in C as a book in mid-August. (I'll also make the web guide open to everyone at that time.) In the meantime, I plan to continue the "C Programming" videos. Possible topics include: finishing the game we started writing in part 9, discussion of different code indent styles, critique of my early FreeDOS code, and maybe ncurses programming on Linux.

DOSBox-X is a cross-platform DOS emulator based on the DOSBox project. Wengier wrote: "The latest version of DOSBox-X for DOS is now officially released. It is a cross-platform DOS emulator with official modifications to run in a real DOS system. Unlike all previous versions, this version is now self-contained, without the need of any external files such as a pre-installed version of HX DOS Extender. I added all the required files (especially files from HX DOS Extender) to the package with the approval of the DOSBox-X developer, so that this version no longer requires external programs in order to run in a real DOS system, and the executable is automatically patched by PESTUB so that it can run directly from DOS." DOSBox-X is completely open-source under the GNU GPL v2. You can get the latest DOSBox-X from the Releases page.