Welcome to FreeDOS

mTCP provides TCP/IP applications for your PC compatible retro-computers. Mike Brutman recently released a new version with bug fixes: "Version 2024-10-20 is available. It has a few bug fixes. It also allows mTCP programs to operate at the same time NetDrive is active. (If you know how packet drivers work, that is no small trick.)" The mTCP NetDrive programs are also now included in mTCP. (The mTCP NetDrive servers are still in a separate download.) You can download it from the mTCP website. Thanks Mike!

Make is a standard tool for developers, to automate when to compile or build new parts of the program, without compiling everything. This is extremely useful for large programs. Gregory Pietsch has started writing a new version. From the announcement: "This is my attempt at writing a better make for FreeDOS than all the makes out there. This includes dmake (a toy make) and even GNU make if I can. After two weeks of writing, I came up with this. .. Other PD versions of make use a singly linked list as the primary data structure. I wanted to get away from that, especially in places where I'd have to go over the whole list to find something. This version uses a map, with an AVL tree as the internal data structure. The program also uses dynamic arrays and dynamic strings to simplify the handling of macros." This is version "0.0" so is pre-alpha and "may be buggy, missing a few parts, or not have proper documentation, but at least it runs and could convince others that it could be something good." You can download it from /devel/make/make in the FreeDOS Files Archive at Ibiblio.

WDE is a modular disk editor capable of allowing users to manipulate data stored in various ways on different kinds of storage. The new version 1.1 was recently released, which includes these features: * fixed: mounting logical drives from image files didn't adjust the "last sector", thus cluster numbers beyond logical disk size weren't rejected. * fixed: if current device was an image file, hitting Ctrl-Enter while in sector 0 of a logical drive did switch to a real physical disk. * save file chain: last update date & time now copied. * cmdline option -n added. * file AND directory names are accepted. You can read the full release notes and download the new release from the WDE GitHub.

Lukas Kotek will give a conference talk about FreeDOS at this year's OpenAlt 2024 conference, coming up soon on November 3. From the session description: "The lecture will introduce the retro laptop Pocket 386 introduced this year (follower of projects like Book 8088 and Hand 386), for which the number 386 is not just a coincidence. What are its parameters? What can a laptop be used for? How will FreeDOS work on it with regard to the Czech environment? And what is this open source DOS-compatible operating system that is still being developed today? What are the real experiences after a few months of use? The lecture will provide answers to these and other questions, while the presentation will of course take place directly from the Pocket 386 laptop."

Darik Horn shared this update a few weeks ago: "A beta-quality 7-Zip 24.08 package for FreeDOS is available .. This package contains two executables: 7zr.exe .. This is the reduced build that contains support for only the formats that 7-Zip can create; namely 7z, bz2, gz, tar, xz, and zip. .. and 7za.exe .. This is the aggregated build that contains support for all of the containers and codecs that 7-Zip can unpack. All sixty-three secondary formats are included in this DOS build." You can find it in Darik's GitLab.

SQLite is a programming library to implements a local database engine, useful for programs that need it. Ben Collver has compiled version 3.46.1 for DOS. From the announcement: "Here's SQLite 3.46.1 compiled for DOS using DJGPP. Thanks to Superllu's DoJS for clues about changes and compile-time options needed. The DJGPP diff and Makefile are in the src/ directory." You can download it from Ben's gopher site or Ben's website.

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.