r/bbs

DemiGoth is a BBS I started in those early days of the covid lockdown, focused on the nostalgia of the door games I loved playing as a kid in the 80s and 90s. We plug into BBS link to have access to populated classics to include: LORD, Barren Realms Elite, Global War, and more.

But our main attraction has always been our locally hosted Tradewars game server. Today we have rebanged 3 of our 4 games.

Game A is targeted at the classic Tradewars feel from the golden age of BBSes for all your nostalgia needs, but with settings optimized for modern internet play. It features 10,000 sectors with 1,400 turns a day, and is a pretty vanilla setup with default ships, alien traders, and Ferrengi.

Game B is our longstanding casual game. This is setup for those who enjoy the non-PvP aspects of the game but still want to build your space empire. It has a huge universe of 30k sectors, 10k turns per day, rules against PvP raids, and has been continually running for more than half a decade.

Game C is the newest version of the custom edit we've been working on. It features completely redesigned ships balanced around major roles (scout, trading, combat), a galaxy of 30,000 sectors with multiple bubbles to explore and claim, and 20,000 turns per day. There are additionally a number of custom factions and alien races, each with custom ships unavailable to buy from the star dock, to include:

• Merchant Guild - a pacifist faction with ships specializing in trade efficiency
• Space Pirates - an aggressive faction with fast ships designed for hit-and-run tactics
• Outlaw Syndicate - smugglers and thieves specializing in cargo ships with some teeth
• Primordials - the remains of a fallen empire, though not aggressive, they will retaliate with advanced tech if provoked
• Quantum Striders - a mysterious extradimensional race specializing in rare transwarp ships
• Buggers - an unforgiving race of formics who will arrive to colonize the galaxy after day 7
• Fungoid - hostile and regenerative spore aliens who will arrive to the galaxy after day 14
• Harbingers - a race of overwhelmingly powerful aliens who will arrive after day 45, bent on destroying the galaxy unless players can stop them

Game D is our limited game designed to perfectly replicate the nostalgia of playing during the BBS days. It includes a small galaxy of only 1,000 sectors, only 200 turns per day, and a 60 minute timer to connect. This is designed for those who want to be able to stay competitive, but can't commit much time.

So join us at https://discord.gg/utCukMA7KZ or point your favorite telnet client to demigoth.com port 23 and come join the fun!

A PCBoard-compatible BBS written in Rust. It imports your old PCBoard

installation, runs your old PPEs, and takes callers over telnet, SSH and

websockets. Linux, Windows and macOS binaries, no DOS box needed.

• Runs your existing PPEs - a PPE that does not run is treated as a bug
• Full backwards compatible PPL toolchain: compiler, decompiler and a language server with extensions for VS Code, Zed, Helix and Neovim
• Conferences, doors, bulletins, surveys, JAM message bases, file areas
• Setup and user maintenance as full-screen tools, like PCBSetup and PCBSM
• Binaries for Linux, Windows and macOS

This is the first public beta. What helps most: a PCBoard installation that will

not import, and a PPE that will not run.

https://github.com/mkrueger/icy_board/releases

Some documentation & overview:

https://github.com/mkrueger/icy_board

Wanted to release it ~2 years ago - but didn't get feedback until recently. That's why I now finished the first beta.

A daily survey-guessing door where everyone on your BBS plays the exact same board, so the scoreboard is a real competition instead of a list of who got lucky. Three survey rounds, three strikes each, then Fast Money. Latest version updated for speed on older systems!

The board is built from your BBS name plus the date. No two boards run the same daily game, and a given date always produces the same questions, so a caller making up Tuesday gets precisely the board the early birds got. 14,600 questions in the bank: about five years of daily play before a single one repeats.

Updated for speed for old BBS Installs, specifically MSDOS. https://bbswordle.com/feud/

BirdEnuf Virtual BBS has been updated with a number of custom games, apps, and clients:

Meteoroid - Asteroids clone
Tetromino - Tetris clone
Triangulum - Galaga-like
Gemini, Gopher, and Wikipedia browsers
Multi Relay Chat & IRC clients
Mystic Observatory - Astrological readings and horoscopes
Usurper Reborn - Custom client for main internet server

telnet://bbs.birdenuf.com:2003 or http://bbs.birdenuf.com

Also hosting MajorMUD (10x XP, 10x Drops), iNfInItY CoMpLeX, Mutants!, LORD, TW2002, and more.

BBS 80s style dedicated to the ALTAIR 8800 and IMSAI 8080 systems and more...
File areas with basic and assembler programs managed by Roger Meier.

address: altairminibbs.net:23
From browser: https://www.altairmini.com/bbs-connect/
Official site: www.altairmini.com

For my 16th birthday I told my parents the only thing I wanted was a registered copy of my BBS software (WWIV 4.24a).

It was free to run, but if you registered it (I think it was $80), it got you the source code that you could modify as you saw fit.

Even though the pirated source was readily available and most people ran cracked modded boards, I still wanted to be legit. Kinda like one of the few who actually bought WinRAR.

https://imgur.com/a/BKjR8J3

Hey guys! Some footage of my C64 (running since the 90s!) logged on my BBS has which has just turned one year old! To celebrate I've built a straight petscii 3D FPS style maze race game that supports up to 10 player multiplayer: it runs straight in the BBS, so the faster the baud rate the better! 9600 is probably as low as you want to go for a semi-acceptable frame rate in the game haha.

I made this BBS to provide modern practical petscii use via telnet: a one stop C64 portal for community, news, weather, sports, downloads and everything but the kitchen sink! There's now a weekly social hangout for folks to bounce between the live chat room and the 3D maze race! Feel welcome to join in! Every Sunday UTC 19:00 - 20:00 (if you're in Asia-Pacific this will be the next day). Convert UTC to your local time zone...hope to see you there!

Connection URL is in the video (and my profile, as reddit blocks the domain). Drop in anytime and say hi, I'm usually on the live chat....Much love y'all!

Nobody is more than a couple of days ahead of anyone. That won't be true again for thirteen weeks. If you're going to try the game, this is when you'll experience it the way it was designed to be played.

I built PEON as a modern browser RPG on the old BBS door game structure. If you played Legend of the Red Dragon, Barren Realms Elite, or Solar Realms Elite, you already know the shape of it. You get 12 turns a day, you spend them, and you go to bed. The world resolves at midnight ET. Fifteen minutes is a full session. No ads. Nothing to buy. No pay-to-win.

Play PEON

How you spend those 12 turns: Solo combat in the Dark Forest against six monster types. Your class has affinities and so do they, so choosing what to fight matters as much as how hard you hit. Party dungeons for up to five heroes, with class synergies that trigger depending on who fills the slots. PvP that resolves overnight and appears in the public news scroll, so you do not find out who attacked you until everyone else does. Divine gear cannot be bought. It comes off your forge or something else's corpse.

At level 10 your hero founds a kingdom and a second game opens up. Six specialization pillars mean no kingdom can do everything. Specialize, and you need other people. Wage wars. Launch raids. Lay sieges. Run covert operations. Negotiate alliances. Build wards against the ones aimed at you. Credence tracks whether you keep your word, and everyone in the realm can see it.

The morning after: Every morning the realm wakes up to the same newspaper. Who went to war. Who won. Who got rich. Who got robbed. Who broke a pact. Which impossible drop finally happened and to whom. You are reading a story everyone wrote overnight without meaning to.

What I actually want feedback on: Please do not spare my feelings. If something is confusing, tedious, or simply not fun, that's exactly what I want to hear.

• The guided first run. It's new this season and you'd be among the first people through it. I want to know whether it teaches the game or just the interface, and whether you ever wanted to skip it.
• Whether the async payoff lands. You spend your turns during the day and the results arrive at midnight. My biggest design concern is that the gap feels empty. If you spent your turns and then had no idea what to do with yourself, that's the single most useful thing you could tell me.
• Mobile. It's built desktop-first, but it should still be playable on a phone. If anything overflows, breaks the layout, or is unreachable with a thumb, I want the screenshot.

Leave feedback here, DM me, or use the in-game feedback link, whichever is easiest.

New heroes get 16 turns on day one. Use them tonight, then check back tomorrow morning and see what happened while you were asleep. That first morning is the experience I'm trying hardest to get right.

https://playpeon.com

Power Earned, Order Negotiated

----

Solo developer. Every bug report, suggestion, and piece of feedback comes directly to me. If you take the time to write something thoughtful, it won't disappear into a support queue; it'll go straight to the person building the game.

What it is

Star Merchant II is a multiplayer space trading game that lives on your board and runs in rounds of about sixty days. You are the captain of a single ship in a galaxy of a thousand sectors. You start with a small freighter, five thousand credits, and a map that covers almost nothing.

The core loop is simple: ports scattered across the galaxy buy and sell three commodities, and prices depend on how full each port's warehouse is. Buy goods where they pile up cheap, haul them to where they are scarce, pocket the difference, and put it into a bigger ship. What you do after that is up to you. Some captains just keep trading until they run an empire of freighters. Some plant colonies on planets, grow them, and fortify them until nobody can take them away. Some explore, mapping the deep regions and hunting for something older than everyone else out there. Some work the five powers that share the galaxy, trading favors and tribute until they are too well connected to touch.

All four of those are ways to win. Each has a public score from 0 to 1000, everyone can see everyone's progress on all of them, and the first captain to a thousand on any path takes the round. Then the galaxy is torn down, rebuilt fresh, and the next round starts, with veterans carrying a few small earned perks forward.

You get a budget of turns each day, so ten minutes over coffee or two hours at night both work, and the game is built so that people who log in every couple of days stay in it: colonies work while you are away, a log explains everything that happened since your last call in plain sentences, and unused turns bank forward.

If you played TradeWars 2002 back in the day, this is that family of game.

For the TradeWars veterans

Two design decisions are the reason this exists, and they are aimed at the two things that always bothered me about the classics.

Sieges resolve on the daily tick, not on the spot. Ship to ship combat is still instant. But planets, fortifications, held sectors, and ports you want to raid or blockade are attacked by declaring a siege, which costs turns and a cash bond and resolves at the turn of the day. The defender is notified the moment it lands, by name, and has until midnight to reinforce, evacuate, call allies in, buy an injunction, or counter declare on something of yours. You can bluff and withdraw, and it costs you the bond. Nobody logs in to find their empire quietly gone at 4am. Wars get declared, argued about on the message base, and answered.

The scripts are features now. Everyone serious ran an external proxy with macros, which meant the real skill ceiling was who automates best. So the tooling is in the game for everybody: a trade computer that ranks every route you know by credits per turn, accounting for distance, warehouse levels, regional prices, your reputation, and port fatigue; an autopilot; an auto mapper; saved routes; and a route runner that flies the cycle and stops the instant anything interesting happens.

Beyond those two, the pieces a veteran will want to know about: living NPC factions that expand, raid, and negotiate on the tick, scaled to the active roster so a three player board still feels populated; a regional economy where flooding a region with your own colonial production collapses your own prices there; tracer burrs so hunting one captain in a thousand sectors is actually possible; torpedoes that drain a rival's turns instead of destroying their ship; enforced treaties, including a non aggression pact the game physically will not let you break without three days of public notice; and a victory rule where crossing 1000 does not win on the spot but at the next tick, with the whole board told you are standing there and hours left on the clock to knock you back down.

The feature list

• Procedurally generated galaxy, a thousand sectors by default, adjustable from 200 to 5000, organized into regions with their own price moods
• Three commodities plus a contraband trade with real inspection risk and real margins
• Twenty ships to work up through, from a 22,000 credit scout to a five million credit flagship, plus two hulls that can only be captured or earned
• Six planet classes, colonists who eat, grow, or starve, and six tiers of fortification up to one that announces itself to the whole galaxy
• Five factions with standing from open war to sworn ally, where getting close to one costs you with its rival
• Contracts, stacking player posted bounties, and a hidden gate in the deep regions for the explorers
• Consortiums of up to five captains with a shared treasury, a shared map, and a ship berth anyone in the crew can fly
• Sector defenses with toll, defensive, and aggressive postures, plus minefields
• Novice mode, a guided first cruise, a WHY command that shows the arithmetic behind any number the game prints, and a plain language log of everything that happened while you were away
• The game posts to your message base: war declarations with names attached, bounty notices, a daily Chronicle written like a newspaper, and round openings and closings, each one a switch in the SysOp console

Note: The BBS Software and all Doors created by me are totally free. Try it on the demo BBS (https://www.atdtbbs.com/atdt) or download it for your board (https://atdtbbs.com/). In case you're wondering, the original Star Merchant is a demo Door that comes with the BBS Software to help teach the API if you want to create your own Door.