I have decided to make every previous version of Costa available for download.
In the archive you will find a complete list of releases, with a changelog for each version.
It's a long list, with releases spanning nearly two decades.
13th of August, 2023
Costa 1.7.4 brings a classic PC game to Costa for the first time - Minesweeper! Complete with several different difficulty levels, optional sound effects and more. Aside from this, there are as always a number of "under the hood" improvements.
21st of July, 2023
The sole purpose of the 1.7.3 release is to fix a bug that prevents icons from being added to the desktop once the last icon has been deleted.
29th of May, 2023
Aside from one minor new feature, 1.7.2 brings bugfixes and further optimizations.
10th of April, 2023
The focus for 1.7.1 is performance improvements, and reduction of file sizes. Not many new features have been implemented, but some have been removed. The config utility has seen a complete rewrite and many icons have been remade. VGA support has been removed, as EGA 640x350 looks good on both old CRT monitors, and modern widescreen monitors where the aspect radio fits nicely.
7th of January, 2023
Version 1.7.0 is all about making it easier to work with files. To fulfil this goal, a file selector has been added. This can be used to visually browse folders and select a file, instead of having to type path and filename in input fields. This is used for example when adding a desktop link, or opening a file in the text viewer.
6th of June, 2022
The most notable change of 1.6.0 is the addiction of EGA support. Now, Costa will run on computers with an Enhanced Graphics Adapter with at least 64 KB memory, broadening the range of computers on which Costa is supported. The new EGA mode is also considerably faster on older machines (pre-1990).
29th of December, 2021
This version comes with many minor improvements and changes, but three stand out from the rest: A new UI design based on Costa 0.9.4, massive speed improvements to handling of data files, and full keyboard support in all accessories.
Code optimizations has also helped reduced the combined size of Costas executables significantly.
22nd of May, 2021
As with the previous release, the focus with this release has mainly been on behind-the-scenes improvements. A long requested flood fill function has been added to the icon editor.
22nd of October, 2020
Most of the stuff in this release takes place behind the scenes, where a bunch of minor bugs, typos etc. has been fixed. There is one major addition though - at last, Costa has a built-in theme editor!
27nd of May, 2018
The major feature of this version was support for multiple profiles - meaning more users could share the same installation of Costa, or that one use could have separate profiles for work, play etc.
2nd of March, 2018
This version contained mostly minor improvements to Costa.
6th of May, 2012
Since version 0.9.9, not much has changed - the focus was on improving stability and fixing any bugs I could stumble upon.
1st of May, 2011
Version 0.9.9 was mostly a heavily optimized version of 0.9.8, with a few new features and an icon editor added.
Since each executable file took up considerable disk space for shared functions, Costa and most of its accessories were compiled to a single EXE. This also allowed for faster execution, since everything was already in memory during runtime. By heavily optimizing the code I managed to squeeze all accessories into an EXE file less than 165 KB in size, saving about 400 KB disk space. The desktop alone from 0.9.8 was 105 KB, so that was quite decent.
10th of October, 2009
I came to the conclusion that Costa wasn't developing at the speed I wanted it to. The reason for this was that I needed to design a complete scripting language and write a parser for it before I could actually start making programs for Costa, which meant that all my time was used on the parser. So I decided that the best for Costa was to return to single-tasking, like back in the old days when I released a new version frequently.
20th of May, 2008
This unreleased version was a little crazy. It's actually just 0.9.4, which can be seen if you look at the script files. All GUI code was removed, and replaced with TUI code. This made Costa a text-mode program, but still with moveable windows and such. It was kind of nice, and worked well. But it was more of an experiment than anything else. It was made available here in September 2015, for those interested in seeing it.
13th of January, 2008
Due to the failure of Costa 0.9.3, the 0.9.2 code was pulled out, cleaned up and was briefly being used for Costa 0.9.4, which was released on the 28th of December, 2006.
22nd of October, 2005
Costa 0.9.3 was never officially released, but is available here for historic reasons. It had a lot of improvements over 0.9.2 that made it my personal favorite of the task-swapping editions. Sadly, the code suffered from bad planning and messy programming style. On the 19th of May, 2006 Costa 0.9.3 was canceled.
Unreleased
Although never released to the public, this version was a great improvement over 0.9.1. It has sadly been lost, and cannot be downloaded.
1st of September, 2005
This is just about the same as BETA 0.9.0, with only a few improvements and additions.
25th of August, 2005
Yup, you guessed it. Costa has - once again - been rewritten from scratch. This time to include task-swapping and a script parser!
9th of July, 2005
Once again completely rewritten from scratch, this time with lots of improvements.
28th of May, 2005
This release of Costa was very popular (I got a lot of positive reactions to it).
9th of May, 2005
Released in early 2005, Costa 0.6.0 had a lot of improvements over the last versions.
16th of April, 2005
This release was more of a preview than a BETA. It took the user on a quick tour, showing some of the accessories.
2nd of February, 2005
An incremental update over 0.3.0, this release did not bring much new functionality. There was a major change to the underlying code, though. All GUI related code was move to a so called "quick library", allowing the same code to be written and maintained in one place but used in different programs. This allowed subsequent versions to be developed far easier.
1st of November, 2004
With 0.3.0, the third release of Costa, things really started to look better. This version was never released, but has now (sep. 2015) been made available for download on this site!
23rd of April, 2004
The second release of Costa. Had many improvements over 0.0.1.
1st of February, 2004
The first official release of Costa. 6 TUI versions were made before this one, under various names, but none of them where ever released.