REACTOS 0.4.14 RELEASED

The ReactOS Team is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.14. As with every other release, we’re regularly noting improvements and updates to keep you in touch with what is being done in ReactOS. In this release, improvements range from FreeLoader fixes, Shell features, kernel fixes, NetKVM VirtIO bringup, further work on the Xbox port and support for NEC PC-9800.

Note that it took us over a year to get this release in shape and fix regressions. As such, ReactOS 0.4.14 does not contain the very latest developments we advertised in 2021 on our blog and on social media. They can be found instead in our nightly builds. Consider this a maintenance release, and stay tuned for what’s coming next!

Download :

https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-0414-released/

“Send To” feature and Shell improvements

One of the main highlights of this release is the amount of improvements done to the Shell component, which makes up a vital part of the ReactOS user experience. Katayama Hirofumi MZ is the pioneer of the “Send To” implementation, a feature of the Shell that can be used to send files or directories to a certain predefined location.

In addition, “Open File Location” and “Open Command prompt here” were also implemented thanks to him. Apart from the aforementioned features, let’s not forget the bug fixes that affected the operability of the Shell. Katayama Hirofumi MZ fixed the scroll selection and Mark Jansen improved some COM (Component Object Model) interfaces, so that certain drag-and-drop regressions could be fixed. The implementations of “Send To” and “Open File Location” are shown in the screenshots below:

NEC PC-9800 boot support

NEC PC-9800 (or PC-98 in short) is a series of 16-bit and 32-bit Japanese computers developed and manufactured by NEC. As that type of hardware is based on x86 processors, it is a relatively easy porting target. Nevertheless, every port to another architecture opens up possibilities for finding and fixing bugs in the core modules of ReactOS.

Dmitry Borisov, a new ReactOS contributor, helped to get the PC-98 port in shape. While there is work left to be done in the development of PC-98 boot support, Dmitry Borisov made great strides to get ReactOS booting on that platform. The following screenshot below demonstrates ReactOS booting on the Neko Project 21/W emulator.

ICMP improvements

Internet Control Message Protocol (or ICMP by short) is a protocol used by network devices to send and receive information such as errors or log status. The implementation, primarily residing in our IP Helper API module (iphlpapi.dll), was rather scarce and incomplete with pieces of code unimplemented or unfinished.

Thanks to Victor Perevertkin, and with the help of Tim Crawford, the ICMP protocol implementation has seen lots of improvements. These range from the implementation of the IOCTL_ICMP_ECHO_REQUEST I/O control code to a full rewrite of the Icmp** routines. As a result, the network device drivers can now pass ICMP request and response packets to the applications in a correct manner. This is proven in the screenshot below, which shows the tracert command-line utility now outputting complete information.