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A Little Bit Of BBS Nostalgia
Ron Harwood writes: "I was getting nostalgic for the BBS door games of the late 80's and early 90's -- and decided that some of these could quite easily be brought onto the Web. So, with help from some of the players, I've created a Web version of the old BBS game TradeWars -- and released it as open source. You can try it out at BlackNova.net or download the source for your self at SourceForge. It's made with PHP and MySQL and it's getting reasonably bug free. :)"
Does anyone know of a game called Dominions (I last saw it about 6 years ago) It ran on WWIV. Only seen it once. It's sorta like TW2002 and BRE (has combination of both building a planet and also sending out fleets to attack.)
Thnx,
Fuller
#BBS-Files on DALNet IRC, Come and Chat about the good old days of BBSing!
God, the first girl I dated I met on a BBS. Heck, I even asked her out online:-)
I miss good ol' INDEX in 'Lanta.
Every week we'd have a Bash... the INDEX office was filled with shit we ganked:-) Not just everything from a Waffle house but the employees, but a stool from Quzar, a newspaper stand, and countless road signs. We tried to get the Ben&Jerries cow, but security in that mall had caught onto us. Me and a bunch of others used to get online at night and all sneak out and drive around Atlanta packed into various small cars. Ever been 13 people inna pickup truck going 80mph down a neighbor hood road driven by the only person old enough to drink, and who was, of course, drunk?
God, what I loss in highschool I made up on the INDEX BBS:-)
So what happened to the cheesy ASCII graphics on Tradewars?:-) It just ain't the same!:-)
--Cam
All jocks think about is sports. All nerds think about is sex.
I played BRE every morning before leaving for class, then checked in again at night when I got home ... for years.
We were a part of a very large network of gamers -- it was a lot of fun playing that way! That's why I've been playing games like Utopia for a while now.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
You can find BRE at www.johndaileysoftware.com/bre/ When i saw the web based tradewars my first thought was that there had to be a way to make BRE work on the web too. Maybe some people would be intrested in this... I guess I have a new hobby project just in time for the holidays. Get rid of nospam and underscores to email me.
I am currently running the largest TW server on the net, period. I have "old-timers" coming back to play all the time. Give it a whirl, you'll find my Dual 800 MHz box plenty fast. Almost like the good ol' modem days...
EleqTrizi'T
Sys Admin at twgs.tradewars.org
The Home Sector
Click here to login!
Quite simple, really... nothing else is open. ;)
Joshua
Terradot
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!
I hear ya. BBSes were great. I ran one myself and wrote a few cool door games for my own users. They got semi-popular around other boards, too, but never hugely took off. I always thought that if I had written them 5 years earlier they'd have been huge!
I'm also thinking of open sourcing one of my door games, The Clans. So if you're interested, go here. I'll have an update soon.
You want a little bit of the old nostalgia you can always call a real BBS. :) ASCII and ANSI Text!
- Tradewars 2002
- Legend of the Red Dragon
FIDONet - AdventureNet - MicroNet - JustaXNet
We've got it all baby! Up and running 7 years and still going strong!
Come and play!
telnet://clockworkorangebbs.org
- Xabbu
- Jimbob
That would REALLY kick ass to play them again. I thought about converting them over a year ago, just never had time. Glad to see someone doing it!
until (succeed) try { again(); }
until (succeed) try { again(); }
heh... =)
BEN: Fidonet...Fidonet? Now thats a nework name I haven't heard in a long
time...a long time.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
That being said, I don't think it's a good idea to go back to these things anymore. My original BBS home is still up (now with new and imporved INTERNET email!!!) but telnetting in just makes me think of how far we've come. It just doesn't feel the same anymore. All the old users are long gone, most of the message boards (including FidoNet) go unposted on for weeks or months (or, in some cases, years) at a time....It's kind of like going back to your hometown and seeing everything torn down...I'd rather just have my memories.
What is and what ever happened to this game that i played 1980-1982 where you would walk around looking for the orb in the bottom of the dungeon. Thanks
Anyone had any luck getting DOS door games running under linux? DOSemu? Howabout DOSemuing a whole BBS? Does this work? How do you do telnet access? Some wierd-o FOSSIL driver or something? I'd be curious, and might even setup something if it is feasible.
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
I really don't remember Falcon's Eye... What do I know though :)
You can access The Village BBS (formerly based in Tampa, Florida, USA) via telnet://villagebbs.dhs.org
It's got those ancient door games and message boards. I know *somebody* has to have some extra time at work (after reading slashdot of course). The speed is pretty good. Almost slow enough you think you're dialed in at 28.8k again!
telnet://villagebbs.dhs.org
The theme to the board is loosely based on The Prisoner tv show from 60s Britain.
=steve
--- rapper/producer/bachelorette party stripper
Joined FIDOnet, DementedNet
Remember InfiNet and CyberCrime? Lots of useful info in there... Who was it that ran those? Nigel something from Florida?
Damn... It's been a long time...
-This sig intentionally left blank
There's a copy of Tradewars 2002 v3.0 that was released rescently. It was set up to work as a telnet daemon.
It was only $35 to register, and man o' man do we have fun
Yeah man. The Village is going to have Pimp Wars up... or already has it up. I need to email that sysop.
=steve
--- rapper/producer/bachelorette party stripper
Finally, an online 'cyberpunk' game that comes close to
portraying computing as depicted in classic cyberpunk
works like Neuromancer by William Gibson. In this game
the player is a NetRunner, an arrogant and bold futur-
istic hacker. Armed with his cyberdeck and an arsenal
of offensive, defensive and analysis software he's
ready to invade corporate systems in the grid and raid
their credits, for fame and fortune! It's no cakewalk
though! Waiting for the unwary are Intrusion Counter-
measures (IC). Machine controlled defenses that can
inflict damage to hardware and software, steal the
players own credits and even cause... death.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Werd em up to old school folks.
===sam=== free nessus vulnerability scan = www.vulnerabilities.org
Yo!
I remember that man... Blue Thunder, run by JAFO, was cool. You remember King Lerxt, and the KLCC? I ran a board alternately known as "An Island In The Net" and then "Mars, The Red Planet."
Shoot, those were the days. Any chance you remember a user named Lenin?
sorry to everyone who wasn't in 818...
OoO
OoO
Please do not publish outside of
Okay, totally un-pc, anyone remember Cripple Smash?
Anyone remember a weird text file claiming to show you how to jump your 2400 to a 9600? Anyone ever get it to work?
Anyone know what happened to Wayne Bell?
OoO
OoO
Please do not publish outside of
Poor guy - he makes a cool new (old?) game and posts it to Slashdot...
Now it's dead... Beware of the slashdot effect, more servers die to it than from faulty hardware.
Seriously, it's nostalgic but I sucked at Tradewars and I'll probably suck at this one too...
--
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
I am glad to see that BBS games haven't died... they rock. I was thinking the other day that turn based BBS games (Tradewars, etc.) would make excellent PDA games. Each night when I sync up, it would upload my turns, and reset for the next morning.
I wanted to code this myself, but I don't have any free time right now. Does anybody else think this may catch on?
You must have lived in Houston. I remember many afternoons in 1991-3 playing Tradewars, BRE and SRE on the local BBS's. Let's see... what did I go by... Gold Dragon or Q, that's it. Oh man, now I feel old.
Ashley Clark
A web-based version of the classic citadel BBS software has been created by one of the people responsible for Ed's Room, one of the largest BBS's in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area for many years. It's over at www.edsroom.com.
Another attempt to bring a web-based cit to the 'net is also being developed (independantly of the above) over at the Death Cookie, http://www.endeneu.com/funstuff/cookie/.
And, of course, there's the obvious chance to plug my own efforts to bring a citadel-style board to the 'net. Mine, however, is telnetable (rather than a web-based pseudo citadel interface), and is fairly true to the original cit. The fun part is that it's written for BeOS, completely from scratch in C++. It's fairly similar to CitUX in that it supports multiple concurrent users, the main difference being that BeBS supports door games. ,)
8088online, the test bed for BeBS, is available at http://www.bebs.net. The site's undergoing a redesign right now, and the new website should be up by the 15th. Be aware that there's a java telnet client on the front page, so it may load slowly for you. There are links on the page for those who prefer to telnet.
Now, if only I could get the source code for BRE, SRE, LORD, Trade Wars, and all the other classics...
That green slime had it coming.
mmm, bbs :)
:)
if you want some 31337 oldskool bbs action, check out lord thanks to the worlds most succesful sysadmin, nuke skyjumper
Every board I called reset games at midnight. I would always try to call first so I could kill players in LORD.
--
enterfornone - logging in for a change
I was NOT going to do this, but you KIDS have driven me to it.:) :)
Try going back to 1984. I spend the entire summer on the St. Louis boards back then, mostly the color64 and MTABBS systems (If you knew the mtabbs systems you may have known me as Mycroft or UatU)
Later on me and a good friend ran a color64 board. he bought the good (4800 baud!!!!) modem and bbs software,and later the ram pack and 1851 drive (we had over a meg online!) I provided the line,physical,location, and coding needed to mod the system and run the add on prog's.
The mid 80's where the hey-day for bbs's to me. The bbs outings for mtabbs boards was a lot of fun. I miss the old Junk Drawer and Rolla-link in Exile, among others. --sigh--.
and we did this uphill in the snow both ways
Mycroft <---my handle since 1984
p.s. if you do remember the old mtabbs boards I'd like to here from you, esp if any are still up, just tack @postnet.com to my hanldle (no _VII crap) to email me.
..and agree with ya. I started with a 300 baud modem in 1988 on a C64 and managed to see the rise of QLink -- back when it was cool -- it's morphing into AOL, and the rise and fall of BBS'. ran 2 BBS' too in the late 80's to mid 90's on the C64 then the PC.
it was like a different world. always something new to discover, the "underground" feeling, the politics of "fight-o-net", err FIDOnet, etc...
-Stu
--
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
8 node linux bbs with LORD, TW2002, BRE, Dopewars, and Darkness are all at inso.darktech.org. There are even msgs ;)
BTW The gambling game in the bar cheats. If he/she/it/whatever gets a zero card, its discarded and he/she/it/whatever will draw another card. So their odds of a zero is 1/100 but yours are 1/10.
Heh, I should know, i run a project working on just such a thing, and unlike alot of sourceforge's, mine's beyond alpha and in use by more than 1 website.. I'd post the sourceforge link here, but that page isn't quite ready so i'll just post the link to my site using the software... The Machine
-
Can't just yet - that's a future enhancement - right now I'm working on core functionality.
BlackNova Traders
I'm 23 too, but somehow I was old enough to download my first copy of Doom off a local BBS in NJ. Man, I still remember that day clearly :) My doors game of choice was always LORD...I hope that makes its way to open source sometime.
--------
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
I think its real beauty is how easy it is to setup by people with not much experience. I know of a couple 15 year old kids who had their own site running in 1 night. Things like apache, mysql and so on dont HAVE to be complicated. It just seems that way because of the lack of documentation written with the general user in mind.
-
But would we put up with it today? I don't know. I seem to be less patient these days...perhaps because I have less time now than I did when I was 15 years old.
I think the biggest draw of BBS's was the sense of community. Of seeing those recognizable handles...even if you never met in the real world, you would always respond to each other's posts or request a chat. Not to mention those great, obscure text files! And the downloads (my favorite BBS had a 6-CD changer...and SL-Files (or something like that...).
I think that building an online modern BBS would be the ultimate example of a WWW community. A telnettable ANSI art BBS is just a reminder of how far we've come....
Damn, i loved that door game BRE. Barren Realms Elite, anyone else used to play it ?
There is planetarion nowadays, but it just didn't seem to "cut it" like BRE used to.
and also Usurpers, Vgaplanets... *sniff* major bbs...
Hey Ron, how, if possible, do you see other players currently logged on? I've been logged on for a while now without a timeout, so my guess is that being logged on means you have a cookie and the server doesn't keep track.
Which leads to another question: is there a means for players to communicate in real time while playing?
Geeky modern art T-shirts
I just setup a BlackNova server here:
http://iaccess.cx/blacknova/
Now all we need is some color!
-=Down Syndrome in Maine
I came across my "The Pit" disks the other day. Ah the good ol days. Man that was a good game.
Still, it is nice to see some of these games having clones ported to the web. Even if people can't completely regain the atmosphere of a BBS -- they can enjoy the atmosphere of the games that used to occupy so much time (remember when you tried to fit an entire game of TW2K or LORD before your account ran out of alotted time for the day?).
*Sigh*... I hate to wax nostalgic, but I wish I had been born 15 years early. Due to my youth (born in 1977), I really missed so many great things -- or caught them only at the end of their lifespan.
---
seumas.com
Heh... I did write my latest online game in C, but my new (non-game) websites are in PHP. It's remarkably appropriate and flexible for writing web applications, especially DB-driven ones.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Aaah - I remember Major BBSes. One of these was the first one I was on back in the day in Cincinnati. It had six lines, and one was usually used up by me... Of course, my parents didn't like the strange noises coming from the phone when they tried to call people... and then they made me go and drop carrier... +++ ATH0
Ahh, the good old days. I used to run a bbs, 95-96 i believe, and it was a blast. I ran TW2002, LORD, and Pimp Wars. Oh man. There were 2 'groups' of bbs's in our town. The good ones (which were all run by high school and college students, mine included) and the shitty ones (the ones run by people 30+). Anywho, the people that hung out on the 4 really popular boards used to have bbs night, every tuesday night we would go to dinner and then go bowling. It was a blast. I really miss those days.
You can telnet directly to bbs.ufies.org - there is a web page at http://bbs.ufies.org/ with a couple of useful links like who is oneline now, etc. They have been up for about a year and a half, and are running the game doors on dosemu on a linux box.
Of course, I expect them to get /dotted by all the fresh attention.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
my friends and i ran through the same nostalgia recently and set up a little telnet BBS just to play some old skool door games. It's located at bbs.sexsexworld.com, for anyone wanting to get their game on.
Shameless Self Promotion : Webhosting at Blender Networks.
it was a long time ago, and from memory. I could have sworn the decompiler was made by 'the chicken' ???
Best PPL coder award goes to: Black Cat from (DoD, IIRC) i could be wrong on the group tho...
Forum Foundry, Inc.
Man... I remember I was a co-sysop for a BBS in Toronto...
I had access to the dos command prompt, so I decided to change some of the ansi graphics of the star ships...
this whole PHP3, and SQL stuff, combined with a slow host/provider, doesn't stir up any good emotions when you try to blow up that starship that tried to blow you up last week.
Or have the ability to takeover a planet (that I noticed) that was artificially created by some other guy with a genesis missile... go figure...
It would be nice to have a more graphical interface (even it it was just coloured text)... instead of this standard colour default browser colour scheme.
Money cannot buy happiness, but can buy something soo darn close, that you can't really tell the difference
Can't belive I missed this topic.. damn.
So I'm a little late, maybe someone will notice this.
I had so much nogalstia I decided to ressurect, in a sense, an old BBS I used to go on. It's running Worldgroup (i.e. MBBS), which is hard to get ahold of nowadays. You can telnet to it, or go via web, at tgc2.net. Sadly, a lot of the software is still hundreds of dollars to license, and I don't have that kind of money - hell, right now it's only running off my DSL. But it's still neat, I got a lot of the original people on and we've got a pretty quirky community. Anyone interested is welcome.
telnet://tgc2.net
http://tgc2.net
-palp
Lenin? ya i think i do. my handle was Jack Cane.
and yes, i remember JAFO, KLCC (and hacking it) and King Prick.
-Jon
this is my sig.
I've created http://lord.nuklear.org, a web based LORD game that runs under dosemu/Linux. I recommend you all check it out.
Also, I am coordinating an open-source rewrite of LORD. It is currently in active planning stages. We will be using Perl and MySQL, and it will be fully telnettable and designed for the Net.
If anyone's interested in participating in new features to the Nuklear LORD system, or coding the New Free LORD game, drop me an email.
-Nuke Skyjumper
nuklear@zxmail.com-NOSPAM
(remove -NOSPAM to email me, obviously.)
Hey, damn I had almost forgotten about OO][ I remember running it in a little program I had written that detected when I went to fight and automatically hit space at the right time for me. I also remember that there was a lag between when you hit space and it registered it which varied depending on which level you were fighting on. Of course my little program compensated for that and I had a 100% hit rate which meant I could wander down pretty deep before I had to worry about getting killed with a new character. A decent character could wander all the way to the bottom without to much of a problem.
If you played Trade Wars, chances are you also played Global Wars, the BBS Door version of the boardgame 'Risk'(TM).
BlueDragon has re-created Global Wars on Prowler-Pro: he calls his version World at War, and he has made it look and feel very much like the original Global Wars. I've been playing for months now, it's just as addictive as the original. Be sure to read through the help info on the login page to discover what all the variants are.
-Leperflesh
Note: Risk(TM) is a trademark of Parker Brothers or somebody; World at War is a reverse-engeneered, HTML based game that is based on Global Wars, and not Risk(TM). I am not a lawyer.
I am allowed to criticize you: you are not allowed to criticize me. Sorry, that's just how things are.
:::: Mike Snyder
I miss those times, I found a whole slew of BBSes modified to run on the net, for instance, a telegard board:
bbs.darktech.org
There also a list of net and non-net bbses still running at :
www.synchro.net
:::: Mike Snyder
I think I remember seeing something about that also -- but I never saw it actually up and working. My related game, Starshiptraders has been up on the web -- as well as telnet -- for over four years. Early versions (until June of 99) were called Tsarwars, however.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Make sure you contact GamePort, the owners of LORD, before you start on this.
:::: Mike Snyder
:::: Mike Snyder
Fie upon Windows BBS's -- back in the day (1990-92), I ran Maximus and BinkleyTerm (the Fidonet mailer) in a DOS session under Desqview so I could get work done in another window. I remember receiving a message (in Texas) from a Fido node in Australia; I printed out that message and saved it because it was so amazing that it took *only* twelve hours to reach me. I also recall the day somebody connected to my board with a 300 bps modem (ridiculous even in those days).
Oddly enough, I still have the 386 I used to run the board, because it's so obsolete now that even charities won't take it. I've still got the same modem (a USR Courier) as well, except that it's since been repeatedly flashed from USR's proprietary 16.8kbps protocol all the way up to v90. It now sits in my closet as a backup in case my DSL ever goes out.
Sigh -- *major* nostalgia attack. Oh Bell's Theorem BBS, we hardly knew ye...
In my prime I was even doing fidonet, too (who remembers what a "tosser" does???) and I had more door games than I can remember. TradeWars was by far the most popular and someone managed to rig up some sort of inter-bbs wars.
Tradewars ended up falling by the wayside when Ultimate Universe came out, though. It didn't really have a chance to catch on, though, that was pretty much near the end of the bbs days. IIRC, TW's map was limited to something like a 1000 cell "grid"? UU busted that limit with essentially an infinite universe and many other improvements that I forget.
I still remember the old TW strategies though. Find a dead end at least two cells deep and fortify the piss out of it! ;) After a while you got to know the responses when you were doing a trade anyway, so I could usually haggle right to the exact credit.
Those were the days!
"I can be self-referential if I want to," said Tom, swiftly.
A BBS I still call Longships has the old Tradewars 2002 V1.03D, Stock Market, Food Fight, Telehang, etc games on it. It also supports WWIV Net and WWIV Link. But the BBS hardly get any players in those games. Making the games Internet ready would solve that problem, but your average DOS based BBS isn't internet friendly.
My goal was to write a new version of Tradewars, Food Fite, Stock Market, Global Wars, Solar Realms, etc in C++ and then port them to different systems like Unix, BeOS, AmigaDOS, MacOS, Windows etc and write them so they can support multiple players verses the one player at a time DOS BBS mode.
So where do I learn about the different BBS Door drop-file formats and writing the code in C++ to not just access serial ports but also be run via Telnet for Internet BBSes? Maybe a port to Java later on could make it more portable?
I hope you don't have that old shield bug in your code. Planets became effectively invulnerable once you had 3000 shields on them. It screwed up some calculation and all attacks wound up doing 0 damage to the planet's shields.
Our games of tradewars always ended in a stalemate as each major faction wound up with invincible planet(s).
---
Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
"Where shall the word be found, where will the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence." -T.S. Eliot
>>BBS systems allowed for much more social interaction between users"
/. forum because it reminds me of the old message boards of BBSes, and we actually used to learn things there. Personalities tended to stand out more because there wasn't as much "commercial noise" (For Lack of a Better Word) in the BBSes. In fact, they were commercial-free.
:)
I agree. In fact, I like this
I used to play TW for an hour every day, until the Ferrengi towed my craft and impounded it for some nonsense. I remember feeling like a total newbie compared to some of these conglomerates that literally ruled the universe. Um, make that 'figuratively'... it seemed like the universe.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
BBSes were amazing in their own way.
Limited time available on the dialup line, esoteric features like rate passwords if connecting at less than say, 9600, etc, etc. all made it more challenging, but so much more fun to use BBSes.
I lived in SoCal, and there were certainly a lot of boards around, running stuff ranging from Tri-BBS, Renegade, and MajorBBS, to stuff like WildCat...
For someone who had never been able connect at all with the world, to be able to go 'online,' and exchange information, files, and play games remotely was just waaaaaaay awesome.
I'm not sure what it would feel like now. It felt like the best thing in the world back then, but now that I've had access to a T3 (doesn't college just rule?), and hyperlinking, and IM software, I don't think going back would be quite the same...
this is an excellent thing to spend your time on. the world must know about tradewars!! :)
still, i never played it much myself, but i did play the Pit all the time, and had a big tournament on my own BBS back in the day.
i don't suppose anybody has a link to the latest version of the Pit do they? i'd love to play that game again.
- j
Just thought I'd mention that the ISCABBS is still alive and well. Though te web has chopped it down from it's heady days when it averaged over 1000 simultaneous logins, it still pushes 250 during the day. bbs.isca.uiowa.edu
Maybe you're right... *Goes to store and buys WindowsME*
You can tell a college man, but you can't tell him much.
Telnet isn't the answer. Web games can be fast enough. In fact, web games played over most of today's high-speed connections go much faster than BBS games did at 14.4k when they were popular. I have the somewhat unique perspective of coming from the BBS door-game programming days (I wrote Lunatix, which is listed as one of the all-time classics, plus a VGA terminal/script language called RageTerm which is pretty obscure since it was released late in the days of BBS popularity) -- AND I've been developing web games for the past three years. One thing I'm sure of is that web-based wins out over telnet. Easily.
:::: Mike Snyder
:::: Mike Snyder
:::: Mike Snyder
Pretty close. My company hosts Blue Dragon's World at War browser-based web game at the Prowler Portal.
:::: Mike Snyder
:::: Mike Snyder
For starters, Martech no longer owns the rights to Tradewars in any form whatsoever, it's now owned by John Pritchette of EIS (www.eisonline.com) who did most of the work on Tradewars v3.x
John also created the Trade Wars Game Server (TWGS) which is now operated by many sysops to continue to run Tradewars games easily
and second of all, there's no way Martech or any other individual person could reasonably claim copyright to anything except their specific code, as "Tradewars" was around in many forms prior to martech
I remember the later days of BBS software, before the internet started to get such a market share of dialup users.. the best software i remember:
.MOD support... It was a great game.
:)
:)
PCBoard with PPC (programming language) was very powerful and stable.
I ran the hack software as well, vision/x, oblivion/2, etc, etc. Very fun stuff hacking around.
I put up a LAN between my 386 and SLC2/66 with LANtastics just to be able to play games and run the board at the same time (running it under desqview was too slow)
Fav. door games?
Without a doubt, my fav. was "Land of Devastation" which is being ported to the internet by the original author here: http://www.landofdev.com/ -- it was amazingly complex for its time.. it had a seperate VGA client, which included
Also, "the pit" i loved, "global war" (risk), usurper was pretty cool (kinda like a less PG rated LORD, but with many more options, but no RIP support)
I also remember pimp wars
I remember the great feeling i had after dialing in at 2400 baud to the local boards without ANSI support, finally finding that ANSI "option" in my comm program and thinking i had opened another door to a whole new world just because i had ANSI color support instead of ASCII only
Ahhhh, a tear is forming, i better stop.
Forum Foundry, Inc.
I've played this blacknova traders, and it was a lot of fun. I ended up not having a chance to get on for a week due to hectic stuff and i got blown up =:-) Shit happens, it is fun, so give it a shot...
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
Check out http://www.synchro.net/. Rob Swindell, original author of Synchronet BBS, has begun releasing new versions under the GPL (with the exception of two components that are LGPL). The new version 3.0 for Win32 has (among other things) built-in telnet support, so you can quickly set up a telnettable BBS that allow you and your friends to get a Trade Wars or LORD fix. He's even working on a Linux port.
never a BBS door game.
Utopia is better than anything in the genre. Warning: very addicting
http://games.swirve.com/utopia/
I've put up some design notes about SRE here:
c le s/SRE-Design.html
:-)
http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/Arti
I hope someone finds it useful when cloning the game.
I don't think we could ever get back to the days of knowing one another as was the case with a BBS. The number of users are just to great to get that one on one dialogue going. Instead, the internet has become a large collection of quick, unrelated posts, usually with commercial motives.
That's where I'd say BBSes got their romance from. You weren't constantly bombarded with advertisements on many of the systems. Even if you did, it was usually just a flashing line telling you the sysop hadn't registered a door.
How can the web be like that now? It was that way 5 years ago before everybody and their brother tried to make money in some way. When was the last time you found a good website that wasn't cluttered with banner ads and actually had some functionality?
I ran my own BBS for about 6 months and it was great because I had the ability to be creative with it as well as offer a standard set of functionality. My only investment was $200 for PCBoard software and another phone line, and then only $15.00 a month for the phone line. Who can setup a web server for that amount of money and offer message boards and online games.
What I've found very amusing is discovering that people I know now, used to hang out on the same BBS's as I did five years ago. You know you'll be hanging out with other geeks and someone will start talking about the good 'ole days and you'll start talking about all your favorite long dead BBS's and you'll discover that your current boss turned out to be that guy you played TW or BRE with many many moons ago.
"Listen: We are here on Earth to fart around. Don't let anybody tell you any different!" - Kurt Vonnegut
Play BRE here: games.swirve.com its called Earth 2050 but its almost exactly like BRE
-- "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Jean Jacques Rousseau
Try a telnet BBS. It isn't quite the same, but it's definitely just as cool. I was amazed at the blast of nostalgia I got when I tried to navigate it all again, as if for the first time...
We had lots of BBSes running WWIV, and some Renegade and other stuff. Oblivion was really cool, and I remember one BBS that was run off of OS/2; I don't remember what the software was, but it was pretty impressive.
And yes, there was extra stuff I didn't mention, like "Time Banks". Actually, I wish I could set a daily time limit for slashdot posting; that would be interesting!
And yes, I love my T3... Boy, we're spoiled these days! Even sending Internet E-mail from a BBS was a royal pain!
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I've always wanted an open source TradeWars 2002 clone, written in C and for UNIX and specifically playable by telnet. Now that would be awesome.
I think so - but Stars! has become much more popular.
BlackNova Traders
The mgetty and vgetty programs appear to be very weak and buggy plus they don't work with every modem.
I need the Voicemail and Fax abilities, the BBS would be a bonus. Any ideas? E-mail them to cable4096@hotmail.com
It is good to hear that I am not the only one who misses the good old BBS days. I miss the ANSI graphics that would scroll down your screen at whatever bps you were connected. The users of most bulletin boards were a lot more friendly. The number one thing I miss is the fact that there was "no advertising" except in the appropriate places, SysOps worked very hard to make sure things ran smoothly, and they usually did. Of course I don't miss my phone bills. I'll never forget my $80 phone call to Canada where I fell asleep waiting for something to d/l and it never logged me off. There has to be some way of reviving this scene, I would love just to see some ansi graphics from groups such as ACiD. I've had almost every speed of modem there was 300, 1200, 2400, 9600, 14,400, 16,800, 28,800, 33,600, and finally 56K. I was very sad when the Internet killed the BBS sites. We are now forced to mingle in the same area as spammers and Aol Lusers. Before the Inernet became popular, 99.9% of the population (at least in the US) did not know what a modem was. I think I still have my Oblivion BBS setup backed up to floppy..... /me looking through disks.
I was looking for the very same BBS doorgames a few weeks ago and found a really good one.
If you're looking for a good BBS you can telnet to that carries LORD, Usurper, and a bunch of other cool doorgames, check out telery.com. It's got all the oldSkool goodies. And you can get an acct. anonymously rather than through the lengthy process of automated callbacks.
Check it out, but don't take my node.
Please check out Galactic Trader! It was a great time waster for some friends and I in college. Now I run it on my own vintage VAX, with many enhancements. I can't guarantee you'll like it as much as Trade Wars, but it might appeal to those of you with an itchy trigger finger!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Now that was a cool game.
now more often seen in places like russia, etc. but still kicking with a few diehard hobbyists.
Also an underground way (if slow) to do email, etc.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
There have been periodic resets as the game has developed - remember that Blacknova is in beta still...
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
http://www.rocketaware.com/cgi-bin/rktshow4.cgi?c= /orbit/Tq/comm/prog/terminal/
Most of the fun was spoiled by those things.Hell no, most of the fun was because of those things. Remember ansi bombs in the 80's, crashing WWIV ? And the good boards provided something that the internet struggles with, a strong sense of community. Don't get me wrong the internet instills a sense of it, but not nearly as tightly as the old bbs's used to do. And this is all besides the fact that 90% of it was free.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
See the info for Space Trader, a game for PalmOS capable PDA's.
Ron created a great game, guys. I used to play back when I had time, when Ron had finished the first revision of the game. It was pretty stable then, and I'm sure it is a lot better now.
If you liked TradeWars back in the BBS days, don't hesitate to check his site out!
-Godfather
Omigosh! I remember those! I particularly remember Iron Knight (although I wasn't much on his board.
I spent a lot of my time on the Dragon's Weyr, Megapolis, and... ohh, I've forgotten the names. Mostly I stuck to the good storyboards. Gosh, I miss storyboards.
-- I'm not evil, I'm
I've been working with PHP for a while now, and it just seems to me like the wrong language to program a web-based game in. PHP is still very much in a development stage, and running any sort of web-based game in which the page refreshes for every command just seems like a lot of overhead processing.
I've actually been running my own telnet-based tradewars server for a while now, and the lack of configuation options in TWGS has really made the game quite repetitive. I'd gladly welcome any open-source initiative for a new telnet/applet based tradewars clone.
shameless self promotion - http://kibbles.org
I miss the door games just a little (good old LORD - that was such a ball!).
I really miss the storyboards. I used to spend hours a day writing and keeping up with the stories. I do quite a bit of gaming these days, but nothing is quite like those old storyboards.
Some friends tried to ressurect some of the old boards using (ack!) the Geocities guestbook function, which worked for a while, but died of real life obigations. (I have the cast list and archive of one at http://www.eclipse.net/~srudy/enigma/index.html .)
Now it seems the web community is too big to run one of these without it going random too fast.
Those were the days...
-- I'm not evil, I'm
The Internet was full of script kiddys poorly run ISPs and broudband hosts that were tech idiots.
It was full of incompatable protocalls. Websites that couldn't be seen if you didn't use one of the top two web browsers and they both sucked.
Why would anyone want that? I mean even the preveous age of BBSes was better by mesure.
Back in the days of BBSes I rember it a tad diffrently...
The vast majority of BBSes were quite good but occasionally a few poor run systems existed.
The biggest problem was obnoxous users. The precurser to trolls and script kiddys.
Obnoxious Sysops become Idiot SysAdm..
Obnoxious users become trolls..
Script kiddies and on and on..
We didn't leave it behind.. Most of it is with us today..
And worse...
Socally it didn't improve.... We have the same mesure of assholes.. Only switching to a new ISP dosn't solve the problem the way dumpping poor BBSes did....
I don't actually exist.
BBSs can still have a valid web presence. Pyroto Mountain is a perfect example. Originally a BBS, it grew and adapted. It's chat, trivia, message board, and, to quote my daughter's animatronic Tigger, fun-fun-fun-fun-fun.
Oil of Wormwood: because absinthe makes the heart grow fonder.
Enjoy!
It was cool to see some BBSes still holding LORD Tournaments - its best when you play with the cheats disabled. ;-)
Then there were so many other games...my BBS Sysop was an avid gamer himself (is still!, though he's not a Sysop anymore). So many games he had registered after seeing the response to them. There was also this game on the lines of LORD...which had Dogs in it (don't remm. the name), and you had to fetch bones, woo bitches, fight with paws and what else.
I feel bad about the fact that majority of the Sysops chose to close down their BBSes due to the Internet instead of moving the BBSes to the Internet - perhaps because most of them were hobby BBSes and they didn't have the time or money to spare....neway.
Anyone ever use the device driver named Gateway to handle ANSI/IO redirection on their BBS? That was my contribution way back when. Shoot, should have kept going and evolved it into PC/Anywhere then NetMeeting then... :')
I am hosting a Legend Of the Red Dragon system running from dosemu/linux. It's totally web based, and is pretty cool. I recommend all of you check it out. It can be found at http://lord.nuklear.org
I'm also coordinating an open-source rewrite of LORD using Perl. It is currently in active planning stages.
If anyone would like to contribute ideas/code to either the Nuklear LORD system, or the Free LORD project, it would be very welcome.
-Nuke Skyjumper
nuklear@zxmail.com-NOSPAM
(remove -NOSPAM to email me, obviously)
I remember playing tradewars on 3 different boards..Man Big Joe
Anybody seen Pimp Wars? :)
Sure, telnet to damageinc.darktech.org
Renegade was a Turbo Pascal WWIV 3.X rip-off as was Trek BBS and many other boards that got based on the Turbo Pascal based WWIV 3.X source. My hats are off to those who converted the source to Turbo Pascal 4.0 and higher, because they practically had to re-write the code to work with the new compilers. Wayne Bell did a port to Turbo C and used the ideas from these other boards that modified his original code.
I wonder if anyone would have an interest beyond a few friends of mine that remember the whole thing..
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I have begun work on just such a project..in fact i began work on it over a year ago. The results of it can be viewed at The Machine. The code for it is also freely available from there. It's tightly knit..probably wouldnt work very well for massive systems with hundreds of thousands of accounts. The site currently has about 1900 or so, and averages a few thousand pageviews a day. About the amount your larger BBSes would have back in the day. I'm working on bringing more of a sense of community to it..but currently it works quite well.
-
It's relatively easy to setup..i wrote the instructions for installing for a normal person, even though it uses apache and mysql. I know of a few people with no programming or networking experience running it off their home computers. Check out the site at The Machine
-
I know, I know I shoulda used preview, but hey, it's early.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
I was an active participant of the 201 area code (northern NJ) BBS scene from about 1985-1992. I used to run my own system 'Dronefone' on an Apple //e (20MB Sider, 5MHz Rocket Chip) on homegrown software. I was part of the 'BBS Triumverate' which included an IBM site called 'Middle Earth' (2AM BBS software) and a C128 run by a man by the handle of IronKnight. We were very popular sites, and we had doors.
Some of the doors that were popular at the time was TradeWars (of course), DopeWars and the Infocom adventures. I wrote a few, the most obscure being a game called 'The Maze' which was written in DragonSoft BBS's scripting language 'Autoscript' for a board run by 'Citizen Stile' (a big Peter Gabriel / Genesis fan).
Those were the days. Back when making a cup of coffee, kicking back and reading some posts on your (or other) boards was quite relaxing and entertaining (regardless of the fact that you were cruising along at 300bps).
I think there is still one site left from those days, a small C64 BBS called North*Link at (973) 376-0816. I think it's only 300/1200 and works best with C64 graphic-enabled programs. They still have a few doors left.
Anyway...
--
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I would say that the main difference is that it was more personal. I met people on there that had common interests with me, ended up working with one guy, made a few other friends, and even one enemy who turned out to be a wimp.
BBSing was my first introduction to an "online community" and it was much more of a community than slashdot or most of the internet based ones that you find now. I know there were certain disadvantages to BBSing, and that most of them were mediocre ones that people set up in their houses to run at night just to be "31337" but there were a few really good ones out there.
You say to leave it in the past, but without knowing the past we can't build a more interesting future. There is a lot to be learned from those days. Imagine connecting to the internet with a 2400 baud modem. Well, with most BBS's right up until the time of the internet, that was perfectly fine as long as you didn't intend to do file transfers. Also, you had to be more creative with setting up your site, as you mostly only had ASCII graphics. Later on, more complex things came along like RIP graphics, or even some had a windows GUI you could use, but for the most part the people running a BBS had to do more work, and had more quality BBS's than all these losers with their geocities websites. So, I guess what I am saying is that yes, we can not bring back the days of the BBS, and it would be a step backwards from a global network. However, there are things about those days that were superior to what the internet has today, and we should try to learn how to improve the internet based on where we were in the past and where we are today.
Mas vale cholo, que mal acompañado.
fidonet! now there's a network i haven't heard mentioned in a while. my first net access was through fidonet (bbss with internet connections were really expensive!), and i got screamed at a lot by the sysop for chaining together bbs message board -> bbs/fidonet email gateway -> fidonet/internet email gateway -> email/ftp gateway -> ftp to download files from the net by email. :)
:(
:)
and now i have dsl and haven't logged on to a bbs for ages, even though a friend of mine is still sysoping one.
not that i miss slow connections and inane boards, but the bbss were amazing in that they supported actual communitites. i mean, people on bbss lived in the same geographical area, bumped into each other on the boards a lot, and many reallife friendships started on the boards. there's nothing quite like that anymore on the geographically-blind internet.
i can't resist comparing this to the extinction of eccentric private bookstores due to chains like borders or barnes and noble. sure, now the selection is vast and information is cheap - but the interaction with interesting people is lost.
but now i'm sounding like a nostalgic 1995-era wired journalist pining after a vague dream of 'virtual communities'. i better stop.
My other car is a cons.
--trb
I actually payed for Tradewars. I wonder if I still have my old registration code around somewhere.
Someone was working on a Linux version of TradeWars a LONG time ago...
I don't accually know what happend. I guess the guy got tired of it...
It was a telnet game pritty much like the telnet BBSes that carry TradeWar 2002...
Anyone else know about this?
Called Trade Wars Next Generation or something along that lines
I don't actually exist.
Yankee Trader I believe was the initial version of TradeWars... I used to hurry home from junior high so I could beat the after school rush to the 1 line BBS. I never got into TW at all, but I'd love to see YT again somewhere. And where's The Pit? That's the best door I ever played.
I used to run a Remote Access BBS back in 92-93. I miss the days of getting up late at night to see who was on, or responding to a chat request, etc. I don't suppose anyone would happen to know where I could pull the RA software from these days?
I never could figure out why anyone would ever want to stop using a shell account and Lynx and start using some RAM hogging *graphical* web browser.
I ran a BBS as well back in the day... Speaking of graphical memory-hogging stuff, remember Robo-board with the Windoze term software and simplistic graphics support?
Yeah... Them were the days...
-This sig intentionally left blank
Anyone interested in door games can also check out bbs.ufies.org Telnet there and in the online games section is tradewars, lord and several others. Lots of fun
Haha I worked for MediaHouse up until August. We threw out so many Roboboard manuals to clear up storage space. My buddy still does support there, he's got a set of Roboboard disks and manuals somewhere, I want to get my hands on them.
BTW- Roboboard 1.08 was way better than RObo/FX
So where are all the good things? When is Slashdot going to offer some converted door games?
Currently I use JSP..i rather like it :) But not to get into language holy wars. They all have their places.
-
It wasn't a role-playing game or a door (I don't think), but does anyone remember Flash Tank? I Loved that game! It was an ascii-based strategy game in which you drove your little diamonds around (tanks) searching for the enemies' base and then killed it to win the game.
SDMI: Finally! Music that won't rip or burn! Brought to you by the fine folks at RIAA.
I tried running Lord2 (a very cool multiplayer RPG) on linux. I was never a SysOp, and I'm not very good with linux. I intalled the win98 DOS and lord2 on an old 40mb hd, and figured out how those "dropfiles" work. The game runs ok, I could telnet to the machine and run dosemu, and then the game. I also could run 2 instances of dosemu using the same disk, but it doesn't support that, so I can't play the game with more than 1 player, or the filesystem gets a little corrupted.
I gave up. Did anyone succeded on something like this?
--
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Longships is the oldest BBS I still call. It is in the 314 area code and it is WWIVNet and WWIVLink connected with many DOS based BBS Doors like Tradewars, Telehang, Foodfite, Stock Market and many others. Perhaps the last BBS in that area as many of the others are going down for the count.
How can you compete against free Internet service via bluelight.com or Juno? The only thing the BBSes had going was the BBS Event. We all meet at Six Flags, or a Park, or a Bowling Alley. Then you could see the faces behind the handles. The BBS didn't have commercialized posts, and mostly had those rebels that made their own computers in their basement with mail-order parts.
Remember when USR gave SYSOP discounts on 9600 HST modems, the only thing was you had to have a BBS running for at least a year at the same number. Every BBS had them, this was before the V.32 standards. Then later USR had the same discount for its Dual Standard modems, just about every BBS had them.
Now, you might as well run a BBS Forum from the Internet and pay for a web site, instead of an extra phone line. Have the BBS Forum accessed from the web site. Or just use one for free at EzBoard like IWETHEY did. The old Infoworld members now reside there as Infoworld dropped their own forum after many problems with it.
We've posted it on HappyPuppy and the user base is now about 1400 so it should be able to handle SlashDot. I too wrote it in PHP & MySQL. URL is: www.prowler-pro.com/war I've added a lot more features than Global Wars ever had, though - but maintain the look and feel of a door game. No Java or Flash but it's great for dial-up connections that way. My latest feature is War Fog variant - you can only see the owners and # armies on countries you border. You can play real time too instead of 1nce per day IF you can get the other players to stick around for it. BTW, I was the original owner of Dragon World BBS. Much as I loved Tradewars, I never had enough time to devote to it. I liked Global Wars better as it only took a few minutes a day. I've also taken some suggestions from a group of RISK game fanatics (F.I.R.E.) in France to come up with a dual Ranking system that is amazingly well suited for the game, though it was designed for chess. The War Fog variant was FIRE's idea too, but it works well with this game. Totally free of course, but I don't plan to open source it - at least not till I'm done playing with it so much.
I still boot up and dial-in to my friends private server every week. This is sweet. I hope it doesn't get spoiled by graphics or any of those other unnecesary things. All a real gamer needs is a good imagination.
PHP's a fine choice for this; I'd probably use it myself. The only alternative that readily springs to mind would be to write a daemon in C to interface with Imatix's great open source Xitami web server, which is especially friendly for this sort of hackery.
Anyway, I look forward to playing Tradewars again. Good job!
--
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
SynchroNet's released under the GPL and it's as solid and easy to set up as I could ask for. Under my Win95 box, anyhoo.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
Anybody seen Pimp Wars?
Chris
Earth sucks! Utopia is much more fun!
Seriously, I've been playing Utopia for a long time now, and it's much more fun, exactly because of the teamplay concept.
(Though right now, killing teammates has become too hard...)
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Barren Realms Elite, Solar Realms Elite, Trade Wars. Ahhh the days of waking up at 4 in morning just to dial up at 1200bps, play your turn first, get the good prices, attack after attacking at 11:30pm, Ahhh, now its 24/7 2Mbits down stream Counter Strike.
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Is this noise in my head, or music?
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Certainly do. Not likely anything's been done with it though. Fact is, at best you'd end up with another MUD and there's already thousands of those already running (and quite well at that!). Still, it would be nice to see an HTML-based MUD - but then go to Everquest or Ultima Online and you've got the next obvious step in that genre.
I looked at it. Pretty good. Definitely has the ambience of a BBS. My cable company should have broadband service within a month. So after I get my cable modem I'll have to download the software.
:)
Is it open source???
Keep up the good work.
Then I discoved a local VAX system with Lynx and forgot about it all.
I've still got my email from Mark Andreesen thanking me for a bug report on Netscape, even though I never could figure out why anyone would ever want to stop using a shell account and Lynx and start using some RAM hogging *graphical* web browser.
Hindsight and nostalgia *sniff*
Hmmm, this has caught my interest. I used to run Renegade BBS Software back in the day. It was not open source, but it was free. Now I aw thinking of setting up a whole telnet-able bbs. I could not seem to find any working Renegade links. Damn.
So does anyone know of any GPL full bbs software for linux that has telnet-able access? I am really looking for something like Renegade or Telegard. I saw Mistic BBS but I do not think it is GPL. Any ideas?
*sigh* I miss the good ol' days sometimes... :-)
Joshua
Terradot
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout!
The author should concentrate on an original idea, rather than trying to recreate this great game by guesswork. It comes off looking like a real hatchet-job.
Gee, looks like somebody doesn't want
Remember when you had an ISS loaded with 50000 fighters, and you accidentally blind TWarped to a sector with a port in it? And then when you were blown up, your escape pod was blown up by a passing Ferrengi/player/asteroid? And then your planet (which was finishing a Level 5 Citadel) fell to a Photon Torpedo, and all of your colonists and products and money taken?
:)
I sure do.
I haven't played tw.xmission.com since
I loved BBSes. I loved them even when I had a 14.4 modem, 'cause I'd still connect at 2400 just to chat to the same people all the time...
:)
Maybe slashdot was like this. In the beginning. A little. But I'm sure I could configure a machine to be much more like a BBS, on the web, or not. I think that having a small community of quirky people is a requirement as well...
But if it had to be a web page, then I suppose you'd have to have topics and comment threads (we have those, but the topics are somewhat regulated). You'd also have to "Login" and "Logout", and optionally be able to post silly comments that show up at Login. You'd have a file area, with lots of useful stuff (freshmeat.net?) random text files ("How to get HBO for free" => textfiles.com?) and funny stuff. Of course we always had polls...
So yes, the Internet has elements of the BBS community, and places like slashdot have it more than most, but it still isn't the same, and every BBS feels different, too, with a very unique, ingrown sense of community.
I remember Another World felt very friendly and homey, and Cedar Republic felt more serious, (but it had TWO lines! You could chat with a friend!) and Psychotronic was basically a nest of Trolls...
In retrospect, I wouldn't give that up for anything. Maybe not even for the computer I have now instead of my 386 back then...
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Merchant Empires is one of the best 'adaptations' of TradeWars that moved to a new medium. It is also opensource, with a home page of http://merchempires.sourceforge.net/
It also uses simular technologies as the storys subject, but is much better at taking advantage of graphics, etc..
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
I think BBS systems allowed for much more social interaction between users that the internet does. BBSes were limiting in that it was usually people within local calling distance. But that gave you a chance to have user group meetings and have people over to show them how everything worked. There was actual social interaction going on.
While the web and browsers are technically superior to a ANSI art on a terminal program, they just can't match the functionality of a BBS. Just about anywhere you were, you could just post a message and usually get a response. Everything was laid out in a fairly simple format. One keystroke to access different sections. Don't know what commands to use in a section, press the ? key.
For those of you complaining about having to learn an esoteric command structure: What about linux, or DOS, or almost anything else that has any functionality?
While I don't want to give up internet access and my browser for certain things such as reading Dilbert everyday, I would rather play a strategy game like TW in character mode that some commercialized java applet game.
BTW, does anybody have any examples of multi-player games that existed before door games? Ones that didn't require two people physically sitting next to each other.
Yes, you are so very correct. Slashdot embodies all the worst of BBS-type entertainment. I never thought about it like that. Hmmmm. I will never post again to this site. I diliked that old stuff and I find my self loathing this "community" even more.
Does anyone remeber Fantasy Land in it full-color ansi-animated glory? That is what teenage BBSing is all about.
As a completely unbiased party ¥I am the developer of ME, I would also recommend Merchant Empires©
The level of development of ME is far and ahead of BlackNova© See my post below ¥as AC for some of the technology behind ME© Also, Merchant Empires has no banner ads©
Oh the humanity!! I had a dozen planets, a few billion (trillion? anyway, a bunch of zeros) socked away; a missile array so big the Vorlons would notice me again -- GONE!
boohoohoo
I tell you, it's the perfect analogy to door games - you play for a while, beat all your roommates, and then the BBS Op moves or his mom shuts him down or something. Total system failure -- now there's nostalgia.
What a long strange trip it's been - The dead.
AF-Design, web development.
My local group of friends also had the same recent nostalgia. Thus we have Tradewars, Legend Of The Red Dragon (LORD), and even a whole BBS, complete with his original computer specs (bragging about his 28.8 modem.)
--------------------
`Lex - Find Me Here: Text Appeal
play @ Intergate Besides nothing says Tradewars like the real thing!
--
Aitvo
Systems Administrator
Intergate - The finest in online ansi gaming
--
8vO
Web-based games are inherently flawed because (correct me if I'm wrong) you can't maintain state between pages. For example, in a web-based tradewars game, every time a player performs a new action, the server has to check which player it is, load up the player's info, perform the action, and return a new page. In a telnet or applet based tradewars game, the server could maintain a thread for each player, maintaining state and saving a lot of processing.
PHP is great for web sites (like /.), but it sucks for game development. Take my web site for example (http://kibbles.org). I wrote it from scratch in PHP with a MySQL backend about four months ago. I chose PHP because unlike Perl (which is still my favorite language), you can embed PHP in web pages. It's worked out pretty well, but I found it very obvious that the PHP language is rough on the edges. For example, some functions (htmlentities, htmlspecialchars) are named without any delimitation, while other functions (mysql_connect, preg_match) use underscores. (And to make it worse, I name my functions like thisFunction and thatFunction.)
So in summary, PHP was made for quick web development, and that's pretty much all it's good for. My next web site will probably be written in ActiveState's PerlEX, because Perl 5 is a much more refined language.
shameless self promotion - http://kibbles.org
Web-based games seem to be creeping up every where. Looks like GameCentral.Net is working on some type of web-based RPG too, called Legend of the Blue Dragon. Heh, Sound similar? Despite the name is not really like LORD at all. Seems to be in beta and you have to sign up for an account but its kinda fun.
This is what sessions are for.
There are plenty of BBS's alive and kicking these days. Ironic that this was posted, since I just started playing LORD again last week for the first time in years. I'm not dumb enough to post any direct links here, but a quick search on Google for "telnet LORD" (or game of choice) should get you where you want to go. I'm still looking for LORD II. Sigh. That one just started taking off when my local scene died.
At first it was playing a handfull of games my dad got for our C64, he was into programming at the time, and his Vic20 just wasen't pulling it anymore.
.. ah crap i forget. but it ran WWIV ported to the Mac (anyone remember the name of that?). got so much into it i decieded to make my oun BBS. I checked out BBS software for the Amiga, but all they had we're funky little scripted ones. So i used my familys x86 (that my dad and I built) to run WWIV.
.. if only i had the patience now.
.zip files and add my little Altered States add to the the .zip's. made ANSI (and ASCII) adds for the board and posted them at other boards. and after a few months of no calls, I started getting popular.
Then on the news one day i saw "Dragons Lair" and new i had too have it. It ran on an Amiga, so after bugging my dad for about 2 months strait (can i get it? can i get it? can i get it?) i got my first computer, an Amiga 500. I actually got really info 3d rendering using Sliver, then Imagine 3d (1.0). but for some reason right after i got an Amiga 3000 (oh those we're the shit). i lost interest.
then i got a modem. a USR external 14.4 (about $260 at the time)
I got a local recycler and called up a few BBS's listed. Got onto a BBS called
I called the board Altered States (as i was into drug info at the time), to get files for the board i spent about a strait week calling every other BBS in cali that might have drug-info files. sure a lot of them we're complete crap - strait out of the Anarchists Cookbook. but it filled up the drug sections. at the end i have something like 700 files. all comenented.
I also ran a program that would crawl through all the
So popular i got a new machine, a used 386 and a 200mg harddrive (the x86 had a 40mg HD). got around 50 calls a day for a while, one of the most popular boards in 818. I had regulars and a very active message board... i miss that. We had user meets, over 50 people showed up. Sometime they would have user meets I wouldn't even plan. it just became a regular thing, people made friends on the board. we all lived in LA/818. I got my first email address via ThunderNet (a WWIV based network), and i ran PimpWars on the door games.
about 6 months later i was stoned one night and did a del * on the wwiv directory...
woops.. dude..
so after a few weeks of nothing, and the same night as braking up with my girlfriend i made a new board called "The Plastic Board". while it never did as well as Altered States. it had it's following. until about 96, when it became to apparent that there was really no need for it, WWIVNet, ThunderNet, and Blue Thunder. all very popular at the time, we're all dieing, the Internet (information suport highway - at the time) had took over.
long gone, but Slashdot kind of reminds me of that. thats why i come here, to read the messages.. at the new user screen for Altered States i had a message.. "We don't supply the sugar, that comes from you". meaning the board was really what people made of it, and they could add to it as they wish. I like that idea.
-Jon
this is my sig.
I and three of my friends got kicked out of a game at this BBS, for connecting from the same IP address.
Go play. Tell `em I sent you.
Yeah, I played on the stardock until it went away a few years ago. This thing, with its web interface, might be worth investigation.
;)
This server is pretty slow right now -- but it's slashdotted -- it may be much better later. It would be interesting to see how many users are logged on right now with the thing still responding. This may be a quality implementation.
Starshiptraders is written in C but requires a dedicated server and lots of memory to achieve good response. I've always been afraid to submit it to slashdot.
Geeky modern art T-shirts
That was my favorite door. Anyone else agree?
There used to be a canonical list of BBS's published by someone named Skib Sebak (sp?). I can still remember some of my favorites: PBBS, TiBBS, the various CoCo boards, Nochange (lots of games here)....I would hit all of them with a Commodore 64 and a HesModem at 300 baud....
(SIGH)
And now, to complete my retro moodiness, I return to my regularly scheduled screwing-around-with-xmame.
Lots of posts from the US about their old BBSes - we had some classics over here too.
I used to be a regular on Arcade - they're still going, on (0208) 654 2212 (although with a sadly depleted complement of lines).
Still call up from time to time when I'm at home (although the crappy terminal software I have to use has nothing on Hearsay).
What's Hugo Fiennes doing these days anyway?
On a related topic, anyone else miss the glory days of Fidonet? Ah, I remember it well - I was 2:255/75.5 for a while, then switched to 2:255/93.4. Had a real sense of community did Fidonet.
Oh well - back to impersonal anonymous old Slashdot.
arnald
DXgaming has a copy running which isn't so polluted with problems and rampant cheating.
No sig is worth reading.
I had a WWIV BBS. Did anyone else here use WWIV for their BBS?
The site is just damned slow right now... but it's still kicking out pages...
BlackNova Traders
If you were making a web-based game - what language would you have used?
I could have used perl, or python or even C if I had wanted... but I wanted to learn PHP...
I don't regret that choice.
BlackNova Traders
telnet bbs.techropolis.net 2222
I'm also in the process of getting an inter-bbs BRE game.
Come and play! More users the better.
I remember putting up a Wildcat BBS in North Chicago and being one of the first Programmer BBS in the Chicago area. I remember moving that BBS (as I was moved) to Ca., and being one of the first Programmer BBSes in Southern Ca.
;) I got a registered version of TradeWars around here somewhere...
I remember helping being in a local meeting group witht he author of the Door game... Gopher Hunt. I remember helping to Beta test it.
I remember hacking together a few utilities to patch the wholes between a Wildcat, FidoNet, and
TranScan.
I miss the Fidonet message groups (especially TOTT, Turned on To Teens).
The web is cool, but it's just not the same as BBSs. I don't get the same 'community' feeling from the Web, etc... that I did when I was the Sysop of my own Wildcat BBS.
I loved the BBS door (don't remember the name) that was post-nuclear war, and has 'wastelands' that you went-out a fought in, etc. I spent every possible moment playing that. Trade Wars was cool too.
Man... I'm thinking of taking this 1.2 gig HD, and 486 machine here and putting my Wildcat! DB up locally just so the wife and I can play....
And for the record.... I was born in 1977, and would trade my Web-site and 'web forums' and internet newsgroups for a Wildcat! BBS, FidoNet, and Door games in heart-beat.
Thanks to the original poster and all those that wrote in.
If you where the Sysop of 'Three Sheets in The Wind', 'Hiawaths Jolly Wigwam', or numerous other in the Chicago & SD, Ca area. Feel free to contact me...
Former Sysop,
GCG Programming BBS
George, Programmer Cheers!
wow.. I remember the days.. just last week I wasted a few hours playing NetRunner.. Man that was a cool game.. There are utils for windoze which give you a fossil driver connected to the telnet port which you can use to run the old bbs programs unchanged. They don't work too well however.
How we know is more important than what we know.
You know... I have yet to find an Internet e-mail program (except maybe Pegasus Mail) that does thing like the BBS/QWK mailers did with TagLines. These where the best. Another great idea, basically lost... :(
George, Programmer Cheers!
Howdy all!
I have an occasional BBS channel up on irc.dal.net as #BBS-Files
Also, irc.thebbs.org has several BBS related chat rooms.
BTW,
Does anyone know of a game called Dominions (I last saw it about 6 years ago) It ran on WWIV. Only seen it once. It's sorta like TW2002 and BRE (has combination of both building a planet and also sending out fleets to attack.)
Thnx,
Fuller
#BBS-Files on DALNet IRC, Come and Chat about the good old days of BBSing!