2026-01-11

Lua for Watcom builds from 11th of January 2026

What's new:

• Increased stack size on LUA4G.EXE to prevent 'stack overflow!' error on more resourceful scripts.
• Resource management improvements to INFLATE.LUA and UNZIP.LUA scripts.
• UNZIP.LUA now allows users to specify a directory to extract to and which files in the zip to extract (or exclude) with similar parameters to the Linux version of unzip.

Known issues and limitations:

• Large memory model binaries (LUA16 and LUA21) cannot support a Lua table that exceeds 64k of memory (#7)
• Despite improvements, INFLATE.LUA is still too resource intensive to run on 16-bit machines (Lethja/lua-scripts#1)
  • For 8086 DOS pkg.exe from the SvarDOS repository can be used like a zip extractor.
    Example usage: pkg unzip file.zip

File contents:

• WLEee5b6.zip - Watcom Lua Executables: A zip file containing binaries for each platform.
• WLI89774.zip - Watcom Lua Images: A zip file containing floppy disk images
  (for direct use on floppy drives, 86Box, MiSTer FPGAs AO486/PCXT cores, etc...)
  • 1.44mb disk images containing binaries for each platform
  • 160kb disk images containing just LUA16.EXE

Check binary native targets and binary compatibilty matrix to see which executable(s) can be used on your system.

2026-01-01

Lua for Watcom builds from 1st of January 2026

Happy New Year!

What's new:

• Lua byte compilers LUAC*.EXE are now built and included in the release
• New UNZIP.LUA and INFLATE.LUA scripts for extracting zip archives using only portable Lua code. It supports stored, deflate & deflate64 compressed files
• Added additional disk images so that the new byte compilers and more scripts can be distributed to real hardware and emulators more easily
• OS/2 binaries readded to 1.44mb disk image, they are compressed inside OS2.zip to fit on disk 1

Known issues and limitations:

• Large memory model binaries (LUA16 and LUA21) cannot support a Lua table that exceeds 64k of memory (#7)
• INFLATE.LUA is too slow and/or resource intensive for many retro machines to run (Lethja/lua-scripts#1)
  • If you have trouble extracting files with UNZIP.LUA use a different zip extracting tool until the script has been improved
  • For 8086 DOS pkg.exe from the SvarDOS repository can be used like a zip extractor.
    Example usage: pkg unzip file.zip

File contents:

• WLE1fafb.zip - Watcom Lua Executables: A zip file containing binaries for each platform.
• WLI11ede.zip - Watcom Lua Images: A zip file containing floppy disk images
  (for direct use on floppy drives, 86Box, MiSTer FPGAs AO486/PCXT cores, etc...)
  • 1.44mb disk images containing binaries for each platform
  • 160kb disk images containing just LUA16.EXE

Check binary native targets and binary compatibilty matrix to see which executable(s) can be used on your system.

2025-12-23

Lua for Watcom builds from 23rd of December 2025

What's new:

• Updated to Lua version 5.5.0
• OS/2 binaries (LUA21.EXE & LUA22.EXE) no longer fit in the 1.44mb disk image. They are still available in the executable zip.

File contents:

• WLEb9124.zip - Watcom Lua Executables: A zip file containing binaries for each platform.
• WLI61fcb.zip - Watcom Lua Images: A zip file containing floppy disk images
  (for direct use on floppy drives, 86Box, MISTer FPGAs AO486/PCXT cores, etc...)
  • 1.44mb disk image containing binaries for each platform except OS/2
  • 160kb disk image containing just LUA16.EXE

Check binary native targets and binary compatibilty matrix to see which executable(s) can be used on your system.

2025-08-07

Lua for Watcom builds from 7th of August 2025

What's new:

• Added DIFF.LUA and PATCH.LUA scripts
• Small improvements to existing scripts

File contents:

• WLE098bd.zip - Watcom Lua Executables: A zip file containing binaries for each platform.
• WLIbac89.zip - Watcom Lua Images: A zip file containing floppy disk images
  (for direct use on floppy drives, 86Box, MISTer FPGAs AO486/PCXT cores, etc...)
  • 1.44mb disk image containing binaries for each platform
  • 160kb disk image containing just LUA16.EXE

Check binary native targets and binary compatibilty matrix to see which executable(s) can be used on your system.

2025-07-08

Lua for Watcom builds from 8th of July 2025

What's new:

• Fully self contained Linux i386 build (LUAUX.ELF)
• Corrected default package path in DOS and OS/2 interpreters
• Reduce the size of several scripts to make disk space for LUAUX.ELF

File contents:

• WLE608bb.zip - Watcom Lua Executables: A zip file containing binaries for each platform.
• WLI11c03.zip - Watcom Lua Images: A zip file containing floppy disk images
  (for direct use on floppy drives, 86Box, MISTer FPGAs AO486/PCXT cores, etc...)
  • 1.44mb disk image containing binaries for each platform
  • 160kb disk image containing just LUA16.EXE

Check binary native targets and binary compatibilty matrix to see which executable(s) can be used on your system.

2025-06-22

Lua for Watcom builds from 22nd of June 2025

What's new:

• Added support for PE32+ binaries to PE95TIME.LUA
• Added FATSTAT.LUA A script that prints what sectors on a ima image are allocated to the disk (similar to mshowfat) and optionally can zero out any unallocated sector
• Use FATSTAT.LUA in CI builds to make disk images determenistic and compress better

File contents:

• WLE15c48.zip - Watcom Lua Executables: A zip file containing binaries for each platform.
• WLIcdc4a.zip - Watcom Lua Images: A zip file containing floppy disk images
  (for direct use on floppy drives, 86Box, MISTer FPGAs AO486/PCXT cores, etc...)
  • 1.44mb disk image containing binaries for each platform
  • 160kb disk image containing just LUA16.EXE

Check binary native targets and binary compatibilty matrix to see which executable(s) can be used on your system.

2025-06-15

Lua for Watcom builds from 15th of June 2025

What's new:

• Improvements to PE95TIME.LUA
• Use PE95TIME.LUA in CI builds to give LUANT.EXE a repeatable hash like the other EXEs

File contents:

• WLE50f60.zip - Watcom Lua Executables: A zip file containing binaries for each platform.
• WLI6c82f.zip - Watcom Lua Images: A zip file containing floppy disk images
  (for direct use on floppy drives, 86Box, MISTer FPGAs AO486/PCXT cores, etc...)
  • 1.44mb disk image containing binaries for each platform
  • 160kb disk image containing just LUA16.EXE

Check binary native targets and binary compatibilty matrix to see which executable(s) can be used on your system.

2025-06-05

Lua for Watcom builds from 5th of June 2025

What's new:

• Lua v5.4.8
• Zip files have been given names unique to their version going forward:
  • Watcom Lua Executables (WLE)
  • Watcom Lua Images (WLI)
  • Followed by the first 5 characters of the zips SHA256 checksum
• Added PE95TIME.LUA: This script converts a PE executables build date & time metadata fields to 24th of Augest 1995 (The release date of Windows 95). This is used on LUANT.EXE in the GitHub workflow to ensure repeatable builds and checksum verification.
• Updated DOSFREN.LUA: No longer requires a unix shebang at the start of a file to convert LF to CR/LF

File contents:

• WLEe91af.zip - Watcom Lua Executables: A zip file containing binaries for each platform.
• WLIf7ce8.zip - Watcom Lua Images: A zip file containing floppy disk images
  (for direct use on floppy drives, 86Box, MISTer FPGAs AO486/PCXT cores, etc...)
  • 1.44mb disk image containing binaries for each platform
  • 160kb disk image containing just LUA16.EXE

Check binary native targets and binary compatibilty matrix to see which executable(s) can be used on your system.

2025-03-21

Lua for Watcom builds from 21st of March 2025

What's new:

• Added icon and version infomation to LUANT.EXE
• Added description metadata to LUA21.EXE and LUA22.EXE
• Added DOSFREN.LUA: This script converts file line endings so that if first line has a shebang it is properly formatted for UNIX execution while maintaining readability in legacy DOS/Windows systems.
• Added DICE.LUA: A tiny script to roll dice
• Capitalise require() arguments in scripts to maximise UNIX compatibility
• Refactored all existing scripts to take no more than 3kb of disk space each. This frees more clusters in the floppy disk image builds for the end users own scripts

File contents:

• Lua Exe.zip: Zip file containing binaries for each platform and all scripts
• Lua Ima.zip: Zip files containing two floppy disk images (useful for emulators)
  • 1.44mb disk image containing binaries for each platform and all scripts
  • 160kb disk image containing just LUA16.EXE and a minimum set of scripts due to space constraints

Check binary native targets and binary compatibilty matrix to see which executable(s) can be used on your system.

2025-03-16

Lua for Watcom builds from 16th of March 2025

What's new:

• Added md5sum.lua and s256sum.lua. These two simple scripts that mimic md5sum and sha256sum from GNU Core Utilities respectivly.

  While slower than their C counterparts these scripts will work on any Lua 5.3+ interpreter and make these utilities available on platforms where no native version exists.

• Added tictac.lua. A simple game of tic-tac-toe against the computer.

• When present, exbench.lua will add additional benchmarks to bench.lua:

  • Checksum MD5
  • Checksum SHA256

File contents:

• Lua Exe.zip: Zip file containing binaries for each platform and all scripts
• Lua Ima.zip: Zip files containing two floppy disk images (useful for emulators)
  • 1.44mb disk image containing binaries for each platform and all scripts
  • 160kb disk image containing just LUA16.EXE and a minimum set of scripts due to space constraints

Check binary native targets and binary compatibilty matrix to see which executable(s) can be used on your system.