Michael Klamerus at the DOS Shareware Zone has announced another DOS Games Jam! From the website: "This is a casual jam for creating video games that would fit in with the games released for the DOS operating system during the 80s and 90s. DOS-inspired utilities, zines about DOS games, and tabletop games inspired by games from that era are welcome too! .. This jam hopes to be a good opportunity to start creating games if you've never made one before. There's no voting in this game jam so feel free to experiment and try new things." Submissions open from September 30 to October 31, 2020. More details and rules at the DOS Games Fall Jam website.

If your FreeDOS programs display PNG images, you might be interested in the PNGLIB library. PNGLIB (1.0) by Thomas Bleeker is a free library to read and display PNG images. The original code is x86-asm and can be linked without using zlib. With the author's permission, developer leisureBamboo has translated the code to C. You can find it at the PNGLIB website or the PNGLIB project on SourceForge. PNGLIB is available under the MIT license.

Remind is a sophisticated command-line calendar program borrowed from BSD Unix. Ben Collver writes: "I recently built Remind 03.03.01 using DJGPP. Remind can produce printable Postscript and machine-readable JSON. It also includes Perl scripts to export and import .ics calendar files." Remind is distributed under the GNU GPL. You can download it from Archive.org or mirrored at the FreeDOS files archive on Ibiblio.

You can run FreeDOS under Linux .. but did you know you can run Linux under DOS? Well, sort of. DOS Subsystem for Linux is a "WSL" alternative for users who prefer a DOS environment. DOS Subsystem for Linux integrates a real Linux environment into DOS systems, allowing users to make use of both DOS and Linux applications from the DOS command prompt. Looks like he's using VM86 mode to instantiate a dedicated Linux kernel with BusyBox to run the Linux commands. This is not a full Linux installation in a virtual machine, this is only the kernel + BusyBox. And yes, it supports FreeDOS. You can find DOS Subsystem for Linux on GitHub.

Ercan Ersoy has released a new version of FDTUI , now version 0.5. FDTUI is a text-mode user interface for FreeDOS, similar to DOS Shell. New in this release: * Fixed some typographic errors on French translations and Turkish README. * Updated French translations. * Added new French README file. * Updated changelog. FDTUI is licensed under GNU General Public License version 2 and GNU General Public License version 3. You can find the source code at the GitHub FDTUI site, and download the latest version from the GitHub releases page. Ercan is planning new changes for the next version, planned to be 0.6. That version will likely replace the text user interface library FDOSTUI with the the D-Flat library.

If you do programming with Tcl, Ben Collver has built Tcl 8.6.10 for DOS. This is a patch release, so it primarily includes bug fixes and corrections to erratic behavior. The changes file at the root of the source tree contains a more complete list, but a quick list is: * Tk event loop rewrite prevents event ring overflow (possible compatibility issue) * New commands * Fix crashes, hangs, and memory leaks. Ben has posted his version on archive.org, and I made a copy in the FreeDOS files at ibiblio. Thanks Ben!