It’s been a few months coming, but MKVToolNix 1.6.5 is here.

There are many new features and bugfixes, far too many to list!

Feel free to get it from my software page.

Yes, I’ve been abusing my internet – I’ve not updated my website in a month, and I haven’t been about. The truth is, I’ve been spending much more time exercising and LESS internet time. It feels good to not stare at a screen for 13 hours a day.

I finally had a chance to work on my WAP gateway. I had a few minor mime type and coding issues. Oops. Silly me.

No, it’s not public, and I don’t exactly expect to make it so, but who knows, I’ve been known to create silly little utilities and programs.

[Note that I have removed my build of MikMod from my software page, as it is now mostly-maintainable from Raphael’s builds, however, if you still want it, here it is.]

I’ve been asked this a couple times, and each time it’s given me a smile. A user who previously downloaded my build of MikMod wants to take their favorite songs, and import them into iTunes, or burn to CD.

It’s pretty easy, actually. My libmikmod build includes the ‘AIFF’ and ‘RAW’ disk writers, so you can just tell mikmod to create a file which you can import into iTunes. The WAV writer is broken in all MikMod releases to date with big endian systems. I’ve only recently discovered this – but my old releases are unlikely to be patched.

I usually use something similar to this construction (for Bourne compatible shells) from the Terminal:

%for n in *.mod *.s3m *.it; do mikmod -d 4 -F -l -X $n; mv music.aiff $n.aiff; done

This will leave you with much less disk space, and several files, such as ‘panic.s3m.aiff’. You can use iTunes to create MP3s, and/or burn them to your CDs.

This is my first MacOS X 10.4 native release, however, it has been tested, and worked fine on a G3 with 10.3.9. Primarily a bugfix version, it still stays crunchy in milk.

I’m presented with a difficult decision, and I’d like some feedback.

First, the status: DOSBox 0.63, as it currently stands, is G3 optimized, and will work with MacOS 10.2.6+.

I was contacted earlier today by Aubin Paul, a rather nice fellow developer who asked me if I wanted to host his build of CVS (bleeding edge) DOSBox. His is G4 optimized, and being CVS, is much, much faster. Sadly, I don’t have the bandwidth to host both builds, so I had to refer him to Qbix, to see what Qbix wished to do.

Aubin’s build essentially (ab)uses several gcc/g++ optimizations – and they do make a difference. However, one of the options which decreases overhead (if gprof is to be believed) is gcc 4.0 centric.

Currently, my builds are for/with gcc 3.3, which work with MacOS X 10.2.6 and higher, as noted above. gcc 4.0 is 10.4 specific; there’s no way of ‘backporting’ it to work without doing things which are not benificial for development – or your computer. Basically, at best, it’d probably make DOSBox a 50MB program, since EVERYTHING would have to be self contained – and then there would still be horrid debugging issues since the system libraries wouldn’t match up.

Should I drop future support for MacOS 10.3 so soon? Should 0.6.3 be the last G3/10.2&10.3 release – or do I release a slower, yet more compatible version?