Pandora.. the BBS simulator/environment?

[skeezix]

OKay, here's another completely bizarre idea of mine. (hey, some of them pan out like C4A

I built a mini-Atari ST emulator a billion years ago, to run my old BBS inside of; it occurred to me a sick thing to do would be to customize it to be a Pandora oriented BBS. Now, not many would actually telnet or dial (a modem for you yungins') into a BBS, but I had this sick idea.. a minimal terminal emulator; it'd make a dial-tone and pretend to call, and then using wifi it would open up a connection to the BBS.

The connection could be full wifi speed, or if you want authentic, it could run at 300 baud or 1200 baud or the like, to torture you a little; add in some line noise, why not?

Anyway, inside the BBS are multiplayer online games, the text based message boards with an obscure command line interface, all the magic pain you'd expect from a mid-1980's dial up BBS. (by multiplayer games, I mean turn based games that only one person plays at a time, since it was a single user BBS; one person at a time, otherwise you get BUSY response.)

If that sort of sickliness got popular, could set it up to 'dial' other online telnet BBSes, so you could use BBSes from your pandora easily. (There are already terminal's for Pandora and linux and so on, but few peopel use them.)

The trick here is a Pandora oriented BBS, and another small community. Like Comp4all .. a way to create a subcommunity within our community, to keep people engaged in new and bizarre ways.

Yeah, crazy bad idea eh?

I don't sleep much, so there you go

jeff

 

[WizardStan]

Couldn't you just load something in DosBox or QEMU with FreeDOS?

I mean, sure, you could get some BBS style forums and stuff, but what good is that if you can't play LORD?

 

[skeezix]

The point was to have a real BBS up on the internets, that peopel could telnet into (which you could use TELEX under DosBox if you wanted to, but I'd just bnundle aq pnd up with minicom or some standard linux term emu in); the actual hard part of the project is editing ASCII, ANSI and C64 + VT52 type screens for the BBS

And yes, I'm sure some would play LORD, or more importantly.. Trade Wars 2000!

You suss my meaning intimately then .. Like in C4A, we'd have a small subcommunity of Trade Wars players, playing on their pandora (and with monthly scores ranked in C4A, naturally.)

And Space Empire Elite, and so forth.

Sick as heck, but .. maybe some peopel woudl dig that

PCBoard + Trade Wars -> Pandora == Lol

jeff

 

[Neelix]

It wouldn't be authentic without off-line readers for the message boards....   I suddenly have the urge to see if I can get BlueWave running in Dosbox...  

- Neelix

 

[_wb_]

I actually had this very same idea some time ago, but never got around to actually doing anything. I used to be a BBS sysop back in the day and I wrote quite a few PCBoard PPE's - too bad most of that stuff went up in smoke in a nasty hard disk crash.

Anyway, the nostalgia factor to have a BBS again would be huge! I was thinking about integrating IRC, this forum and the repo in it.

 

[EvilDragon]

FIDONet!

We need FIDONet on the Pandora!

 

[ckblackm]

Mustang Wildcat! 

 

[moxie]

You're all insane. In the best of possible ways

 

[PowerGod]

LOL, anyway it could be cool for memories

 

[WizardStan]

Retro is the word.

 

[sebt3]

How do you manage to even think to all this with the life your kids give you ? Let alone code that.

You're awesome, as always

 

[skeezix]

My biggest phone bill was about $600 one month; ahh, those were the days FIDOnet goes wild, you find out you'd been calling all over the continent instead of routing local hops.. boom (I wrote my own fidonet system back in the day .. in a variation of BASIC no less

sebt3 -- just be3cause you have no sleep and no free time doesn't mean the head doesn't work   Just wish I had the time to get the hands into the many projects I've dreamt up. At least my robot car thing drives, but zikzak needs a lot of love. Working on a tilt/pan webcam for the car though, so can see what it sees and record crash-videos

Anyway, so crazy BBS idea.. hmmm.. maybe worth doing.

The cool part is.. run a BBS in a VM, and then assign sysop powers to you crazy birds, let you guys maintain the damned thing

jeff

 

[_wb_]

My phone bill was OK - everyone was calling me, which didn't cost my parents anything. But they did have to get a second line because I was keeping the line busy all the time

 

[Green7]

I always wanted a TV with 1(one)megabyte(mb) of RAM so I could let Ceefax load completely in one cycle and I would have zero page loading times. I could either set it to refresh on change or do a complete cycle.

Just a dream...

But I would love a return to BBS.

Simulate load times for the kids

 

[Galaxis]

I built a mini-Atari ST emulator a billion years ago, to run my old BBS inside of

*sigh* Reminds me I still have my full QuickBBS ST installation on a couple of scsi disks (which I shut down in 2000 because one of the Y2K problems was that the QuickBBS ST key got invalidated). Didn't test the disks for ages, guess they are dead by now.

[edit] Eh, should have read further down the thread as I see Space Empire Elite is mentioned there

Other question though - do you know anyone who has the magic components to running a server for Space Empire Elite Intergalactic? I remember polling some guy in Britain twice each day to update my copy of the universe (and get my NeST echomail besides)...

 

[Asmo]

I always wanted a TV with 1(one)megabyte(mb) of RAM so I could let Ceefax load completely in one cycle and I would have zero page loading times.

Heh, my LCD TV actually does that (loads the entire teletext service) if you keep it on the channel long enough. Then they went and ditched ceefax anyway!

 

[skeezix]

I built a mini-Atari ST emulator a billion years ago, to run my old BBS inside of

*sigh* Reminds me I still have my full QuickBBS ST installation on a couple of scsi disks (which I shut down in 2000 because one of the Y2K problems was that the QuickBBS ST key got invalidated). Didn't test the disks for ages, guess they are dead by now.

[edit] Eh, should have read further down the thread as I see Space Empire Elite is mentioned there

Other question though - do you know anyone who has the magic components to running a server for Space Empire Elite Intergalactic? I remember polling some guy in Britain twice each day to update my copy of the universe (and get my NeST echomail besides)...

I think that stuff was included with SEE later on; I'm pretty sure I have the stuff and some others do. At one point I was thinking of doing it .. let SEE run in my BBS in the emu, and then use linux-level FIDO-over-internet type stuff (or just ftp ) do the file exchanges.

But in the end, I didn't expect we'd have enough players for multiple boards, and really.. the whole reason for it was due to local dialing limits; when you can telnet to a board across the net, you might as well all just play SEE 'locally' against each other, instead of sending 6-day-round-trip vollies

Those were the days

I've not actually checked the games on my board in about 2 years or more I bet; I should check make sure everything is still running.. that stuff is so astoundingly fragile. (I got the source for the BBS from the then-current author, and had to fix up some of the code and recompile it to make it work post-y2k, without patching the hell out of the binary. It was annoying enough to write an emu with telnet->serial support for it, without having to hack up the binary as well

jeff

 

[Green7]

I always wanted a TV with 1(one)megabyte(mb) of RAM so I could let Ceefax load completely in one cycle and I would have zero page loading times.

Heh, my LCD TV actually does that (loads the entire teletext service) if you keep it on the channel long enough. Then they went and ditched ceefax anyway!

Your TV has Ceefax?

The BBC had, in my mind, a legitimate claim on what is now called a hyperlink.

 

[Asmo]

I always wanted a TV with 1(one)megabyte(mb) of RAM so I could let Ceefax load completely in one cycle and I would have zero page loading times.

Heh, my LCD TV actually does that (loads the entire teletext service) if you keep it on the channel long enough. Then they went and ditched ceefax anyway!

Your TV has Ceefax?
The BBC had, in my mind, a legitimate claim on what is now called a hyperlink.

Yes (one of several) it did, while it was still around! A Philips LCD. Up until ceefax vanished, was quite handy, you could cycle through the pages as fast as you liked, it just stored them all - as long as it was kept on that channel.

EDITED TO ADD:

Ceefax (Teletext) was much parodied and emulated even in it's day, for it's (BBS-esque) appearance and necessary brevity. This is as good an opportunity as any to drop a couple of screenshots from the (brilliant) 'Look Around You' DVDs bonus Ceefax feature!

 

[Neelix]

I think that stuff was included with SEE later on; I'm pretty sure I have the stuff and some others do. At one point I was thinking of doing it .. let SEE run in my BBS in the emu, and then use linux-level FIDO-over-internet type stuff (or just ftp ) do the file exchanges.

But in the end, I didn't expect we'd have enough players for multiple boards, and really.. the whole reason for it was due to local dialing limits; when you can telnet to a board across the net, you might as well all just play SEE 'locally' against each other, instead of sending 6-day-round-trip vollies

I don't believe I ever encountered SEE but as for Fidonet, I discovered to my surprise a couple of years back that it was still up and running and from what I can see at http://www.fidonet.org/ it seems to still be somewhat active,  so perhaps we wouldn't actually need to emulate that part.

- Neelix