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I paid for Pegasus Mail and for VGA Planets. There were both shareware and both authors made a living from selling it as far as I'm aware.

Both are still around even although I think a few years ago David Harris wanted to quit, but then enough users responded to that message for him to continue:
http://www.pmail.com/
http://www.vgaplanets.com/

As for Trumpet Winsock. I never even knew it was shareware. I just followed the instructions that came with a floppy from my university on how to get online on my 286 with windows 3.1 and a 14k4 modem. (Please note this was so I could use telnet and FTP, www handn't been invented yet, and gopher only ran on the 386s, 486s and SGI Indy's we had available for students at the university.

VGA Planets. Quite the obscure title, but if you've got several friends up for an extended play by email campaign combining Diplomacy with Star Fleet Battles, you can have an amazingly good time.

With no compensation beside the enjoyment of the graphics and the games folks will do quite a bit.

That would be great if Tim Wisseman decided to do the same with his VGA Planets

One of my all-time favorite strategy games, VGA Planets Version 4 (some of you may remember the older versions from the BBS days), is written in PowerBASIC, I believe. I'm actually playing in two games right now. PowerBASIC seems to be a powerful enough tool - the GUI for this game is quite functional, game design & preference issues aside.

Give it a spin if incredibly complicated turn-based sci-fi wargames are your thing :)

Remember that? I'm not the only one who forked over $14 to Tim Wisseman for that game just to play on a BBS. It was one of the best I've ever played, addictive as all heck.

Just about every turn-based, galactic conquest game has been a pale shadow of that one. I had a brief email discussion with the author when he decided to do the Windows version (I was among those who wanted a new DOS version or a port to *Nix) and found him to be a really cool guy.
VGA Planets Home

Maybe I should dig out that floppy disk and load up freedos.

- technik

Yes, this does bring back the good old days. I was in high school (you can imagine what a hit I was with the ladies running my own BBS). So this was the early 90's. I can't remember what years I ran it. It was kind of popular. I started out on 2400 baud and upgraded to 14.4. I was considering adding a second node and was working with another local bbs, Widomaker (who is now an ISP in Hampton Roads) on adding internet e-mail right before I bit the dust. I ran a VBBS system and created my own message network. From what I remember it was called AfterNet or DelightNet. one of the two. We had about 3 participating BBSes. One local and one in the midwest.

And I had a dumb nick. I Am What I Am. That was it. People got tired of /whisper"ing" to I Am What I Am (too much to type) so I shortened it to IaWIa. My little brother I named as co-sysop, CiscoKid.

VBBS was a great BBS program. And the programmer, Roland DeGraaf (sp?) was a great guy. I didn't deal with him too much, but he was legally blind. He had a special monitor rigged so he could program

I also ran VGA Planets which is why a majority of the people were calling in (that and LORD). I'm glad to see this game is still going. I need to check it out.

The software i used for the system was Remote Access, originally written in Pascal if i remember correctly. The theme of my system was mostly multiplayer BBS door game inspired, including a famous play by email game called VGA Planets. I remember using Frontdoor for the Fidonet daily exchange, and The-Draw a lot, to build nice looking (and friendly) ANSI menus.

I only used DOS for the time it lasted (single line, anyway), with as low as a 2MB 12-Mhz 286 with an old 5 1/4" 40MB Seagate (ST-251N) MFM Hard Disk (the N was the 28MS version, not the 40MS :) with mono HGC like card for disply. It didnt change very much, at the last days it used an AMD 386SX-40 with 4Mb ram and a mighty (IDE/ATA :) 80MB seagate hard disk (uhm.. ST-3096A, still fully operational :) and those CPU upgrades were to minimize the downtime required per day for the turn process of the VGA Planets games. (which could easily take 1 to 2 hours on the 286! :) Hmm btw that AMD/Intel 12Mhz 286 (still functional!) was an old DTK *full size board* (i have the large desktop DTK case) with the memory on 256byte chips... (hence, the full size :).

Ah the old days, only thing needed was a decent terminal (with ANSI :) program and preferably a good protocol (zmodem). Who cared what OS/platform had the caller, as long as it were a modem, which, were all true (non soft) modems back then.

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