Once is not always, here is an update focused on only one thing, but a big thing!

To continue with the recent renewal of the Online Games section a month ago, I'd like to share a brand new online game with you today. Published only a few days ago, it has already been enjoyed by more than a million players worldwide!

Why? Because it's a Flash-based remake of Super Mario Bros. en Flash. And not a bare remake; aside from offering you to replay all of the original game levels, it enables you to play with the famous main characters of the best Nintendo games: The Legend of Zelda (Link), Metroid (Samus Aran), Mega Man, Castlevania (Simon Belmont), Contra... and, of course, Mario! Everything coming with the original music score from each game, along with the origial strenghts and weaknesses of each character...

An excellent creation in every domain, that I urge you to discover on its dedicated page.

JOGG, the website hosting the Flash games previously available on this site, went out of the gaming market a long time ago. As a result, I had to bring you some other interesting games to replace the previous ones.

That's why you'll now find 5 new Flash games in the Online Games section. Four of them became real phenomenons (Yeti Sports, n, Bejeweled, Balloons) while the fifth is a 3D racing game published by BMW, "PACE" (Pursuit Across Europe).

Have fun!

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!