Welcome to FreeDOS

DOSLFN is a program to provide the long file name (LFN) API in plain DOS (without Windows). Thanks to Jason Hood for version 0.42 that provides a workaround to avoid corruption issues on FreeDOS, such as can happen when using FDNPKG on some packages. This update resets the drive before creating the LFN. Also in this release: uses LANG (instead of -l) to read message files in an NLS directory. See the release notes for other changes. Download it from Jason's DOSLFN website. We've also mirrored it in the FreeDOS Files Archive at ibiblio, under /files/util/system/doslfn. If you use DOSLFN for long file names on FreeDOS, you should download this update.

The DOSember game jam is an annual streaming event on twitch.tv. Now approaching its 6th year, DOSember participants spend the entire month of December celebrating DOS games, and their surrounding communities. This is a great opportunity to experiment with writing a new DOS game that you can share! More info from the website: "Requirements: Participants make a game that runs in DOS and/or a DOS emulator. That's it. When: The jam itself runs from September to the end of November (three months)." They also note that generative AI (aka "vibe coding") is not allowed.

If you run FreeDOS (or any DOS) on real hardware, you will have problems getting sound to work with DOS games. That's because DOS doesn't have a 'hardware abstraction layer' like modern operating systems; DOS programs talked to the hardware directly, which is why you had to tell each game about your sound card. But since about 1997, PC hardware moved to Intel audio, so games that used SoundBlaster for sound won't work. That's why you need SBEMU .. or Japheth's fork, VSBHDA .. to emulate SoundBlaster. Now there's a fork of VSBHDA that "adds support for using soundfonts for MPU-401 emulation using TinySoundFont, and properly fixes it to make it work with games like Duke Nukem 3D." You can find it at VSBHDASF at GitHub.

Fontana 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 is mostly intended for developers. Ladislav recently released Fontana version 1.1 with thes changes: can be now used also as command line utility which loads text mode VGA font + possibility to load the edited font into VGA character generator when shelling to DOS + supports FNT subformat used in libraries GRX, MGRX and Allegro + bug fixes. Get the new release at the Blocek home page and scroll down for Fontana.

This was announced a few years ago, but it came up again recently. If you use the Open Watcom compilers, you might be interested in PMODE/W v1.33, a 32-bit Protected Mode DOS extender for the Watcom C/C++ Compiler. PMODE/W is a DOS extender for the Watcom C/C++ package. It allows DOS programs to run in full 32 bit protected mode, with access to all memory available in the system. PMODE/W replaces DOS/4GW extender in the Watcom C/C++ package. This was originally released in 1997, but was released under the MIT license in 2023. You can find it at the official PMODE/W website by Charles Scheffold and Tomasz Pytel. Another developer has also made a copy at PMODE/W on GitHub

If you need to transfer data between DOS and another system, here's another option: NetMount enables DOS systems to access shared directories from remote machines as if they were local drives. It operates over the UDP protocol. It has two parts: netmount that runs on the DOS client, and netmount-server that runs on Linux, Mac, or Windows. The source code is available at NetMount on GitHub and is available under the GNU GPL. NetMount client 1.5.0 and server 1.4.1 were released a few days ago, and include several fixes.