Dear mIRC User,

mIRC version 6.1 has been released. With this new release we hope to address most, if not all, of the comments, requests and remarks we recieved over the past year. Lots of new features and functions have been implemented, several things have been fixed and a multitude of things have improved. Enough reason to upgrade!

How to upgrade?
As you know mIRC is distributed in a self-extracting cabinet (mirc61.exe) that helps you to install mIRC on your PC. Simply download the cabinet and run the installer. Follow the instructions the installer program gives to you. When upgrading all your old settings and scripts will stay as they were, if you want that. Read the questions the installer program asks with care and nothing can go wrong. You will be chatting with the new mIRC in no time. If you get stuck or if you want to find out more about a certain feature, just click on a Help button or browse the Help file and you should find lots of hints to help you out. We also give some information on changed, improved and fixed features and functions below.

Where to download?
For the latest download addresses look on the download page! On the mIRC websites also the new mIRC FAQ version 53 (mfaq53hp.zip) is available. The FAQ answers a lot of questions regarding mIRC, IRC, DCC and the like. It also includes a tutorial on Aliases, Popups and on 'programming' the Tools/Remote section.

Registering mIRC
As you know, mIRC can be downloaded freely and evaluated for 30 days. If you find that you enjoy using mIRC, it would be great and much appreciated if you registered your copy. This licenses you to keep your copy of mIRC and helps to support our continued work on mIRC. You can find out how to register here.

Fixes, improvements and new features:
Lots of things have been fixed. Like the default browser issue, a /background bug, an editor dialog bug that most likely was the cause of odd script problems, a memory bug relating to registry handling, a /whois related memory bug, a problem with background pictures, and a popup menu resources bug.

Lots of other things have improved; All Socks5 firewall error messages are now displayed correctly, double-clicking on web/ftp hotlinks now displays a warning dialog before the site is opened, and an important change was made to the way files are created, opened, read, etc. for window logging, dcc sends/gets, and the list channels dialog. The amount of files opened for logging, sends/gets, etc. is no longer limited to a maximum total of 50 or so open files. DCC commands, such as /dcc send, ignore, etc. are now also handled in the form /dccsend, /dccignore, etc. and should also allow /dccallow etc.

Khaled is now using Visual C++ .NET 7.0 to compile mIRC. This also means nicknames are sorted a bit different, nicks beginning with certain non-alphabetic characters eg. _ ' etc. are being placed above normal nicks. This appears to be the standard sorting method in Windows, which Visual C++ abides by consistently. It now applies to the whole of mIRC.
Support for the .jpeg extension has been added, custom file-handling commands and identifiers which allow you to open multiple files for reading and writing. A file type ignore warning explains why a file transfer is ignored, with a direct link to the options dialog, dcc ignore section. Also a new section was added to the servers.ini file from which mIRC will select an initial network to connect to. mIRC no longer defaults to DALnet.

Lots of interface changes this time; Check out the visual styles and new buttons, dialogs, menus etc. A single toolbar button replaces the previously separated aliases, remotes and popups button. At first this looks a bit odd, but it will just take some getting used to. With the color scheme option you can switch between different color schemes easily.

And scripters, there is lots of fun for you; with the $ event prefix the matchtext section of a remote event definition can now contain a regular expression! Binary variables no longer have an upper limit on the number of bytes that can be stored. And $compress() and $decompress() functions have been added that compress/decompress files and binary variables. The result is raw compressed data. Khaled managed to load a multi-megabyte file into a binary variable and compress, encode and write it to a new file, and then reverse the process. Fun stuff eh!

- The "enable" sounds option in the sounds dialog now affects most sounds, including highlight, notify, window/icon flashing, etc. Sound requests and Agents still need to be enabled/disabled individually. This does not affect the use of sound-related commands in scripts.
- Pressing Control-C while marking text in a window now copies the text and cancels the mark process. It took eight years to think of that. It's all about quality you know wink
- Remember how you can 'collapse' all windows you have opened on a network into their status window with Alt+F1? The status window switchbar button now displays the highlight state of all associated windows hidden with Alt+F1.
- Disconnecting via the file menu/toolbar/disconnect command now results in a soft disconnect, allowing any pending server info to be displayed. Incoming data will not trigger scripts, etc. during this time. Eg. if you connect to EFnet, and then disconnect, EFnet sends a "Closing Link" message to the client. Past versions of mIRC wouldn't display that since they were performing a hard disconnect.

Ok, I have to stop. There is too much to tell in this limited space. You'll have to dig through the help file and the versions.txt to get hold of the complete list of changes and their impact. If you have questions, may we invite you to use this message board? The forums offer great help with everything related to mIRC and its features.

Thanks for using mIRC, lots of fun on IRC,