Welcome to FreeDOS

Format is a disk formatting program. It creates FAT file systems and low-level formats floppy disks. Jeremy has shared FreeDOS Format 0.92a (a test release) with these new features: - fix failure formatting on first diskette access (GitHub issue #5) - initial translated message support; currently supports most of messages in FR and TR (some have been added since last updated) thanks to cardpuncher (Berki Yenigün). Translations are done using kitten, but in a format compatible with Tom's kittenc implementation. See NLSFORMAT.EN for all currently supported messages for translation, about 462 strings. Get the new version at Format 0.92a on GitHub.

This is a test release based on the new Format 0.92. From the August 8 announcement: Jeremy has published a new version of FreeDOS Format to fix several reported bugs, and merged a pull request adding 128KB cluster support. You can download the new version from FreeDOS Format at GitHub.

mTCP NetDrive lets you mount floppy disk and hard drive images over the network to your DOS machine, allowing you to examine a floppy image or add gigabytes of network attached storage in seconds. It runs on all versions of DOS including FreeDOS, requires a minimal amount of RAM, and will work across WiFi or the Internet. The server runs under Windows or Linux and requires no special permissions or extra packages to run. The newest version has a big new feature: "Undo" support for hard drives. Other changes include: support for longer drive image names, better error handling when a UDP packet is lost, and some minor performance improvements. Also: "For FreeDOS, I debugged and fixed the glitch where the placeholder RAM disk would not show its directory listing." See the documentation and download it at mTCP NetDrive.

FYI: This is new code under rapid development, so Mike has not released the source code yet. He plans to do so when things have stabilized.

Xcopy is an essential DOS command that copies files and directories. Jeremy has released a new version of Xcopy that fixes several bugs: "fix bug causing timestamps to not always be set correctly - fix bug causing stack corruption on Open Watcom builds - improve free disk space calculation." You can find the new version 1.6 from Jeremy's Xcopy on GitHub. Thanks Jeremy!

SvarCOM is a command shell for DOS, like command.com but meant to be a minimalist shell replacement. Mateusz Viste recently released SvarCOM ver 2024.3, the new version of SvarCOM, which supports $v, $d and $t tags in the prompt, and fixed COMMAND/C processing of batch files and FOR loops. You can download from the SvarCOM website. SvarCOM is distributed under the MIT license.

Gregory Pietsch has been working on libfp, a floating point library. Gregory explains: "This library is supposed to be the complement to libmpi in the C runtime library." Gregory asks all interested developers to test it out; you can share feedback on the freedos-devel email list. The libfp library is in the public domain, and you can download version "zero point zero" at /devel/libs/libfp on the FreeDOS FIles Archive at Ibiblio.

Thanks to everyone who joined us for a very special virtual get-together on Saturday morning to celebrate our 30th anniversary! We like to meet virtually every month or so, to connect in real time and get to know each other as more than just an email address. We alternate topics for the get-together, and this month was social time. We'll see you again on August 4 for a technical discussion - this is a great opportunity for live debugging or discussing technical issues.

And thanks for joining the VCF Live Stream, hosted by Jeff Brace from the Vintage Computer Federation. Jim talked about what DOS and DOS apps were like in the 1980s and 1990s, and what led up to the announcement of the FreeDOS Project on June 29, 1994. He also showed how to install FreeDOS in a virtual machine, using QEMU. You can watch a recording of the Live Stream on YouTube.