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.