I really enjoyed the last FreeDOS virtual get-together on June 29. I finally got to meet many of you; we've exchanged emails and worked online together all these years, and that was the first time I got to meet you. Let's do another get-together! Save the date for Sunday, August 16 11am-noon (that's US/Central, which should be UTC-5). You can use your favorite time zone converter to find the time where you are. Our June 29 meeting was a social gathering, so we let conversation cross many topics. I'd like this next meeting to be focused on FreeDOS. This is a great time to meet other FreeDOS folks you've only met over email, and to compare notes on any projects or programs you're working on. Check the website on August 16. I'll post a link to the front page when the meeting opens up.

links is an open source web browser that supports DOS. Version 2.21 is now available. New features and fixes in this release include: Workaround for a crash on OS/2 caused by gcc3 bug; Updated Turkish translation; Fix a bug that textarea was broken if it immediatelly followed a list; Fix a bug that an image would not be properly resized sometimes. You can get the latest version from Twibright at download/binaries/dos/. We have also mirrored links at our FreeDOS files archive at files/net/links/.

Gregory Pietsch writes: "The ar command is the archiver that libraries use to put .a files together. It's less formal than, say, tar. Mine uses the same archive format as 4.4 BSD Unix's. GNU's format is slightly different. This came out of a compiler project I abandoned a while back but thought some of the pieces I wrote were useful." I've compiled a version of Gregory's ar using OpenWatcom, and uploaded everything to the FreeDOS files archive on ibiblio, under files/util/unix/ar/. Gregory's ar is available under the GNU General Public License. Thanks, Gregory!

DOSBox-X is a cross-platform DOS emulator based on the DOSBox project. "DOSBox-X 0.83.4 for DOS is now released. Like version 0.83.3, this version is also self-contained, so you can simply unzip the file and type DOSBOX-X to run in DOS." A list of changes in this version is available from the DOSBox-X Releases on GitHub, where you can also download the DOS version. This is free/open source software under the GNU General Public License.

Wolfware Assembler (WASM) by Eric Tauck is an assembler for the 8086 and related microprocessors. It takes a standard ASCII text file of instruction mnemonics for input and produces an executable COM file and an optional list file for output. The previous version of WASM was released under a license that was essentially "copyrighted freeware, with source code." Eric has now re-released WASM under the MIT license, which makes this officially open source! Thanks to Eric! (And thanks to Robert Riebisch for reaching out to Eric.) Eric has posted his software under the new MIT license on his website at Shoeless Computers.

Eric's software includes more than just WASM. You can also find TODDY v6.15 (A DOS command line editor), CLONE v2.10 (A floppy disk duplicator), WARP v2.31 (A fast ANSI.SYS replacement) and several other tools for DOS or Windows. The new license is mentioned in the README.TXT and LICENSE.TXT files. We've also mirrored the MIT-licensed WASM at ibiblio.

If you're an Assembly programmer, you may be interested in the latest release of NASM, the Netwide Assembler. The latest stable version 2.15.02 includes a bunch of new fixes including: Fix miscompilation when building with clang. Add "db-empty" warning class, see section 2.1.26. Fix the dependencies in the MSVC NMAKE makefile (Mkfiles/msvc.mak). Some documentation improvements and cleanups. Fix the handling of macro parameter ranges (%{:}), including with brace-enclosed original arguments. You can find the new release on the NASM website. We've also mirrored the DOS version and source code at ibiblio. NASM is open source under the Simplified (2-clause) BSD license.

Update: On 17 July 2020, the NASM development team released version 2.15.03. This adds several new features, including: Add instructions from the Intel Instruction Set Extensions and Future Features Programming Reference, June 2020; Support for bfloat16 floating-point constants; Fix explicit token pasting; Fix macro label capture; Much better documentation for the MASM compatiblity package; and others. Also mirrored at ibiblio.