Wcd is a command-line program to change directory fast. It saves time typing at the keyboard. One needs to type only a part of a directory name and wcd will jump to it. Wcd has a fast selection method in case of multiple matches and allows aliasing and banning of directories. Wcd also includes a full screen interactive directory tree browser with speed search. Erwin Waterlander released wcd 5.3.0. From Erwin's announcement: "It is a minor update. The loading of the graphical tree is faster. For the rest it is minor bug fixes." Download at Wcd website.

Mateusz released a new version of DOSMid, an open-source MIDI/MUS player for DOS. This version added support for additional hardware, fixed a few minor bugs, and optimized the code so DOSMid runs comfortably on an 8086. If you want to see the new DOSMid in action, see this YouTube video. To download the new DOSMid, visit dosmid.sourceforge.net.

It has been a few years now that the HIMEMXextended memory manager was abandoned. There were a few very valuable community patches floating around though, sadly never really applied to any "official" release. Mateusz has created a new project website for HIMEMX at SourceForge. Mateusz also cleaned up the code formatting and removed the "TESTMEM" switch, because it was never implemented. HIMEMX is under the Artistic License.

On Aug. 31, Mateusz Viste updated FDNPKG, his versatile package manager, to 0.99. Changes: -- support for "link" files to include third-party apps into %PATH%, -- compiled FDNPKG with -lemu for 387 emu, so it runs on a 386 w/o FPU, -- during download, progress is shown on a single line (with refresh), -- version string parser recognizes v1.0.2 as being newer than v1.01, -- support for ZIP files that do not contain directory entries (zip -D), -- FDNPKG is not UPXed with LZMA anymore, loads 10x faster on my 386SX, -- added repositories 'SOUND' and 'EDIT' to the default cfg file, -- sources install switched OFF by default. You can grab binaries and sources at SourceForge or iBiblio or just type FDNPKG UPDATE FDNPKG. Thanks, Fox!

Jerome Shidel has been working on a set of power utilities for DOS batch files. Called the V8Power Tools for DOS, they provide "Visual" equivalents to many command line tools, such as VCLS, VCHOICE, VECHO .. as well as new power tools such as VPROGRES (display a progress bar) and VFRAME (for text-mode boxes). You can use these to make your batch files more interactive. I would also like to see them used to simplify the install program into a smart batch file (I mentioned this on my blog). V8Power Tools for DOS are available under the GNU GPL. Screenshots are on the V8Power website. Source code is on GitHub.