You can now discover a fifth song in the new Musical Arrangements section available since the beginning of the month.

This new arrangement is a welcome addition, being a reorchestration of "Silent Night" originally composed for a special "Christmas" edition of the Jazz Jackrabbit game released in 1994. As usual, this arrangement is available as a video on my YouTube channel, as well as on my Dailymotion channel.

Please also note that all the arrangements are now available for free download in the Files download center, as promised earlier, in MP3 and OGG versions.

Happy holiday season to everyone!

Although I used to have several ideas to celebrate the website's creation birthday each year, I must admit, this time, that the new stuff I'm going to tell about wasn't among these ideas.

Having recently (re)discovered SynthFont, a software synthesizer able to play MIDI files using far much better sounds than those bundled with your computer's operating system, I thought that it might be interesting to demonstrate its capabilities with some original game music files, as MIDI format had been widely used on video games until CD-ROM began to replace floppy disks for game distribution.

You'll find these "arrangements" in a new section entitled Musical Arrangements. New section, new name? The difference being that these files have been composed by other people (while the music tracks available in the My Music section have been made from scratch by me).

My part of the work being limited to the use of a self-made custom sound bank, to reproduce the files with intruuments you'd not have heard anywhere else with the exact same sounds, and release the arrangements with self-made videos to bring back some of your gaming memories while listening to the soundtrack.

As of today, only 4 musical arrangements are available, from the Descent, DOOM, Duke Nukem 3D and Killer Instinct games. You can discover them from this website or my YouTube channel. In the very next days, you'll also be able to watch them from DailyMotion and download the arrangements as separate audio tracks in MP3 and OGG formats.

Other arrangements will be available in the future if the concept is appreciated! So, don't hesitate to send me any remarks or suggestions using YouTube or by sending an e-mail.

Have a nice listening and see you soon!

Although years go on, some parts of this website have not really been updated since its creation. Even if it makes sense that My Software and My Music sections are being updated more often, I'm also aware that the articles, links and online games sections are constantly attracting new visitors each day. That's why I decided to update the secondary sections of this website this year.

Most significative changes should be focused on the Articles section. More than a simple glossary of some technical terms used on this website, it will become a place where I'll post all the hardware and software reviews I published on specialized websites, either being simple reviews on a particular product, or more complete articles describing all their interesting features. As this website does not really focus on IT news, this major section update will not aim at challenging IT-related news websites, but will help to centralize what I have written on other websites, without having the pretention to publish complete reviews of latest high-tech products regularly.

In the meantime, the Links and Favorites section will be also updated, to include, among others, a renewed Partners category, similar to what used to be in the Information section, featuring websites which asked to appear on these pages after linking to Arachnosoft. If you sent me a partnership request with your website in the past, I invite you to contact me if I haven't honored this request yet.

At least, the online games section should also be updated with new games to complete the older ones. I must first find Flash replacement games for those previously hosted by JOGG, which have been offline for a while now. As usual, if you have some suggestions, or ideas about interesting games that could be featured on this website, don't hesitate to contact me.

To planify these updates, I uploaded a new poll to grab all your wishes for the forthcoming Articles section update. Other polls should follow this one for the updates of the other sections.

You should also notice that, since the last update of the website in December 2008, I made some bug fixes, mainly related to the download links and poll systems. If you previously experienced some difficulties to download some files on this website, you should try to renew your requests.

Once again, thanks for your support, and hope to see you later for the future major 2009 news!

VSo today, the site has been online for eight years. And, as the time flies, the technology evolves as well, and so do the users' little habits...

Should you be more or less interested by new technologies, there's little probability that you could avoid the trend represented by the netbooks, those very small low-cost computers, designed to be a cheap, light and extremely portable way to access the internet wherever you are, becoming a true alternative to those clumsy heavy bigger-sized notebooks you usually carry on your shoulder. However, despite being useful, these ultra-portable machines also come with something being both their main strength and weakness: a small-sized screen, and its lower resolution compared to the other display devices available on the market.

As a result, most of the websites designed to be displayed under a given screen resolution, such as the one you're reading these lines from, now suddenly appear to be barely adapted to this new emerging netbooks market; being in constant growth since the beginning of the year, and with the holiday season approaching, it's not going to stop really soon; and I didn't mention the case of mobile phones, most of them being nowadays perfectly able to surf on the internet just like any other computer.

As a result, I thought it would be pretty accurate to start adapting this website so that it can be displayed smoothly on any screen resolution. That's why, after several years spent dealing with a fixed width of 800 pixels, you'll now be able to choose to view this website in stretched mode, automatically fitted to the available space. The "Auto Size/Fixed Size" buttons on the top part of the website serves this purpose. Using it, you can switch to a fixed width display to an automatically stretching display and vice-versa, from any webpage, to your convenience, no matter if you choose to use frames or not, the two display modes being completely independant and self-completing.

Nevertheless, this new feature is only a first step: it will quickly be enhanced so you could be able to choose global site font sizes, independently from your browser's text display settings. This kind of feature being somewhat tricky, it requires quite a number of extensive tests. That's why I decided to only enable the size adjustment features in a first time. As usual, feel free to play with it and send any feedback you may have about it.

On these final words, let me leave by wishing you an happy holiday season.

Here is an easy wordplay to introduce some improvements over the file download system of this website.

As of now, all files currently available for download on Arachnosoft are mirrored on several servers, so you can choose to get a file from another location in case you'd experience slow download speeds or incomplete downloads, for example.

Technically, all files are now available from an anonymous FTP server which you can explore as you want, using a dedicated FTP client, a FTP-enabled file explorer or any conventional Web browser.

Additionally, all the files are mirrored on another server hosted by Free, and, as a third alternative, some of the most recent files are also available on the Web server hosting this website.

Of course, the usual download process and links remain unchanged: you can still use the links available on any software/music page to get the files you're looking for, just as before.

The download page will automatically redirect you to the main FTP server, and switch to another available download mirror if the current one is too busy or unreachable. In any case, you'll always be able to choose another download server manually, if necessary.

I've thoroughly tested this new download process to ensure that any file can be downloaded from any server without hassle. Anyway, should you encounter any problem with this new system, don't hesitate to browse the main FTP download server to find the file you're looking for. Of course, you can always contact me for any help.

That said, let me end by wishing you, once again, an Happy New Year 2008! See you next year :)