Digging through my retro books, and I found my old manual from 1990.. I ran my bbs from 1984 (Ravics software/C64) until the mid 90s (PCBoard).. In between I used C-Net, Vision, and Image on the C-64 and C-Net on my Amiga 2000..
Wishlist on Steam here via this link.
I’m learning an awful lot while making this game, and honestly, I’m very aware that I still have a long way to go. I’m sorry if some of the influences feel obvious at this stage, but I’m trying to absorb, learn from, and honour the things that first made me fall in love with this kind of work.
The story takes huge inspiration from the sparks of William Gibson’s 80s imagination, the social paranoia running through Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, the brilliant design thinking of Zachtronics, and old-school favourites like Uplink, alongside more recent games such as Grey Hack and Hacknet.
I’m trying to take those influences with humility, learn as much as I can, and slowly shape them into something that feels personal and new.
I recovered a large collection of my original German BBS archives from 5.25" C64 floppy disks, including posts, messages and discussions - including hilarious sysop beefs and other flamewars - dating back to 1985 and 1986.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPNXpaYHPy0
Also featured articles (boardzine) that reveal how people in the mid-1980s envisioned the future of BBSes and what they thought the perfect bulletin board system would look like.
With the help of Ariel's excellent ATDT software all this historic content has now been imported and integrated into a fully working BBS. Instead of being trapped in old disk images, the posts are now part of a living system again.
https://quipzz.bplaced.net/krs/
For a quick look:
Handle: guest
Password: guestguest
To make the archives accessible to the international BBS community, I transformed the entire system into a bilingual German/English BBS and translated all important content into English. Visitors can easily switch languages and explore 40-year-old messages from the German mailbox scene (that's what BBSes were called over here) without needing to know German.
The archives contain discussions written while people connected for example via 300 baud modems using Commodore 64s, C128s and early PCs, etc. In many ways it feels like a time capsule from the "Internet" before the Internet.
The video also features a small hardware project: I present custom 3D-printed parts for my Dataphon S21-23d acoustic coupler
Many thanks to Ariel for creating ATDT, adding custom import tools for my archive and helping bring this piece of German BBS history back to life.
BTW: If you're impatient, you can boost the default 1200 baud to light speed with a single keystroke (any key *g*) while reading messages.
Here's the website with pictures and features list. https://rainwire.net/
I just thought I would drop the latest project here. We wanted a security first BBS server and just wanted to do things differently than what's out there. I hate limitations and the only way to avoid those is to built it yourself from scratch. Firewall, Security, MFA, Mouse, Sound, Graphics, all baked in at the foundation.
This probably needs another week of testing before it's ready for public consumption but I have moved Dead Modem Society completely over to the Rainwire platform as of a couple days ago.
If you want to look at it live just point your telnets to telnet.deadmodemsociety.com port 1337
SyncTERM or TERMinator client preferred.
Here's a picture of the board running it live...
this editor does a lot of stuff, i dunno, cause maybe i suck at art, i defintely lack patience. i used to be able to sort of get around photoshop, moving layers around, scaling, filtering, applying transformations, etc so this is a lot more in that spirit so i could suck less. I tried to preserve keyboard modes as well and sort of make it so it could behave like a traditional ANSI editor at times so cool ANSI artist won't laugh at it, but who knows, who truly cares - this is for the OG's, the sysops.
it's very smooth and full featured, although i'm not sure it does anything truly new except for the fact you can make your ANSI 3D (i'm the one who released the nintendo 3DS bbs terminal, it actually did yield a bunch of new first time BBS users but i digress)... but there's a lot of stuff there, I'll drop a single screenshot showing an ALF bitmap being converted and transformed non-destructively using some different image to text stuff.
there's plenty of stuff to discover, it's beta software so there may be some hiccups, if you just want to play with it as a web app you can try it out here or if you want to install / compile / contribute / file a bug / fork, here's the repo: https://github.com/hmderdoc/jockoshop/releases
anyways, time to melt away the flab!
Hi all-
If you've been following my ATA BBS project (www.atabbs.com) I have an update. I have demo boards set up for T.A.G. and RBBS-PC. Both are set up for 6 nodes, have a working message and file area, and Legend of the Red Dragon in the Doors section. Visit the site if you want to call one of them.
Please note that this is an Alpha version of ATA. There are bugs. Probably lots of them. It's stable enough to open up, but nowhere close to a finished release.
For those of you who don't know - ATA allows you to run a 16-bit DOS Bulletin Board System from your cheap shared hosting. There are 1-click installs for 16 different DOS BBS's. No Telnet required - just give your callers a URL. No always on server either. The website has the technical "how it works" info in detail. Fully supports multi-node, file transfers, Doors, sysop chat, etc. This is the actual 16-bit DOS software, not a lookalike.
If you visit, please let me know what you think on the support forums, especially if you find some issues!
This project is part of my larger BBS Preservation Project (www.bbspreservation.org) which currently encompasses four different projects. All of these are MIT licensed, 100% free, and open source (except for Usurper, which is under the GPL like the original).
Hi all. Long time lurker of this kind of nostalgia, first time posting something of my own.
When I was a teenager in the nineties I ran a board called Roller Software HQ BBS here in Sweden, FidoNet 2:205/431 if that means anything to anyone still. What I remember most from those years is the door games. On my board it was mostly Usurper and Barren Realms Elite, and also Falcon's Eye and Solar Realms Elite. People would call in every evening just to play their turns and read what had happened to them overnight, and I was one of them on other people's boards.
I've wanted something like that again for a long time, so over the last week or so I built a game in that spirit. It's called Candledeep. You don't need a BBS or a client for it, you just open a terminal and type
ssh candledeep.com
and your SSH key is your account. There's also a page at https://candledeep.com that shows who's on and how to get in, if you'd rather look before you connect.
The idea is that you get one candle a day and go down into a pit under a town, and when the candle is burnt out you're done until the next morning. So a day of play is maybe ten or fifteen minutes. There are six classes, gangs that fight over the buildings in town, a yard where you can fight other players' characters while they're offline, robbing people who sleep in doorways, and a morning news sheet that tells you what happened while you were away. That last part was what I loved most about the old games so I wanted it in there. It's drawn in ANSI at 80x24.
A few things I should say up front.
It is not a classic door with a drop file. It runs on its own little server and you reach it over SSH, so you can't install it on your board. I know some of you will ask that first. If your BBS software can launch an outbound ssh from a menu that might be a way to offer it to your callers, but I haven't tried that myself.
It's for adults. The language is rough, in an old-fashioned swearing kind of way, and there's drinking and drugs in it, like Usurper had.
I also want to be honest that I didn't write the code by hand. I designed it, made the decisions and have been playtesting it with a few friends, but the programming was done together with an AI (Claude). I know opinions on that differ, and I'd rather say it than have someone feel tricked later.
It's still early. Right now it's me and a handful of friends on a small VPS, and I'm sure there are things that are confusing or unbalanced. One friend told me after his first day that he had no idea what he was supposed to do, so there's a walkthrough for new characters now. I'd really like to hear what people who actually remember these games think, including what feels wrong.
Thanks for reading, and thanks to everyone who keeps this scene alive.
Marcus
I've been working on my own BBS project called SkyLordsLab BBS. I'm trying to bring back the classic BBS experience with ANSI colors and a terminal interface. It includes message boards, a guestbook, a file archive, door games and support for both English and Turkish. I'm building and testing everything on an old netbook running antiX Linux. Most of the features are working now but there are still a few things I need to fix. One of my biggest challenges right now is figuring out how to make it publicly accessible so other people can connect and use it. I'm still learning how the original BBS systems worked and trying to understand things as I go.
For those of you who still run a BBS today what would you recommend? Is there anything I should pay attention to when it comes to remote connections, terminal compatibility or security?
I'd also like to hear what features you think a good BBS should have. Any suggestions or feedback would be appreciated
Anyone want to come play Mutants! With me?
There is a solid accelerated time lapse version on Demonsnet.com port:23
2 or 3 of us playing currently would be nice to have more!
I have a satanic Armour and hell blade for you!
