FreeDOS is your free DOS

Ben Collver has been working to compile the BCC compiler in 16-bit DOS. BCC is "Bruce's C Compiler," an old "barely ANSI" C compiler that produces 8086 assembler for tiny/small models. Ben recently shared versions for testing. He adds: "The 32-bit version requires HXRT to run on DOS" and "0.6.21 and 1.0.1 are both OpenWatcom builds. The compiler is too large to compile itself." Version 0.16.21 is probably the one to try, as Ben notes that "1.0.1 has a bunch of changes, some good, and others i don't trust yet. So i am keeping both copies around for now." You can find it at Ben's BCC page. We've also mirrored it on the FreeDOS Files Archive at Ibiblio under files/devel/c/bcc. Note: Ibiblio is currently running very slow.

CSMWrap is an EFI application designed to be a drop-in solution to enable legacy BIOS booting on modern UEFI-only (class 3) systems. "It achieves this by wrapping a Compatibility Support Module (CSM) build of the SeaBIOS project as an out-of-firmware EFI application, effectively creating a compatibility layer for traditional PC BIOS." That means you can boot classic operating like FreeDOS directly on newer EFI-only laptops and PCs. The developers "highly recommended that the partition table used is MBR" for compatibility. Find it at CSMwrap on GitHub. Version 2.0.0 was released in February.

The LABEL command creates, changes or deletes the volume label of a disk. Version 1.6 is a release of changes from Andrew Bird from a few years ago. It adds support in the CATS enabled version to use language specific response characters for Yes and No. Functionally it is otherwise the same as v1.5, only Open Watcom build is provided, but it still supports all previously supported compilers. You can find it at LABEL on GitHub, and the new version is the LABEL 1.6 release tag.

Victoria Crenshaw has been working on updates to FDNPKG16, a network-aware package manager for FreeDOS. Version 0.99.8253c was released last week with fixes and updates: * Updated translations. * Polished some things with the code. * Functionally should be the same as previous minor version. You can download it from the Package FDNPKG16 page on Victoria's server.

DUGL Player is a GUI video player for DOS systems, released by developer 'ffk' on February 28. The player uses external libraries LibOGG, LibVorbis and LibTheora, and supports WEBM and MPEG4. It's still in "alpha" status, and is missing several features including video sound, video seeking, detecting and handling orientation, and aspect ratio. You can find it at DOS-DUGL on GitHub.

Jemm is an "Expanded Memory Manager" (EMM), based on the source of FreeDOS emm386. Jemm386 is the standard version which needs an external eXtended Memory Manager (XMM; examples: HimemX, MS Himem, XMGR ) to be loaded, and JemmEx is the extended version which has an XMM already included. Japheth has released Jemm version 5.86, with several fixes and features. Read the details at the Jemm release page on GitHub. We've also mirrored this on the FreeDOS files archive at ibiblio, under /files/dos/emm386/jemm