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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. :)"
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)
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
Can't just yet - that's a future enhancement - right now I'm working on core functionality.
BlackNova Traders
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
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
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"
THe good old days of '95-'96? Try '89-'90 when there were still Apple // BBSes that ran off of a really slow clone of Citadel 86. Ahh those were the days.
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 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
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
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...
Aaah! Citadel, how I love thee! WWIV- lame. Renegade and Cheeze- chock full of warez kiddies. Wildcat- even lamer. The only worth while boards were the Citadel systems, the only ones, IMO, which fostered conversation, rather than just files. The memories...
Then there was The HUB- with such door game gems as PimpWars... Forget TradeWars and L.O.R.D.- all any board really needed was PimpWars.
Aaron
(rev. bud green/rev. orgy-na/aaron the anarchist/rev. aaron)
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
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
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
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
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
Enjoy!
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.
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
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.
The sad part was, I had better luck meeting chicks off of BBSes than off of the internet.
How pathetic am I?
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?
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...
---
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.
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.
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.
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
Worldgroup Manager was an interesting step indeed, but annoying to code for.
:-) Can't even fool yourself into believing that over the internet.
I started BBS'ing around 1990 or 1991 in the central Jersey area (201/908 - now 732 area code). Ran a BBS off my 8088, 2400 baud modem, 20 meg hard drive. The small hard drive space kept my BBS from turning into a warez BBS, but I still tried to do as much as possible with what I had. Joined FIDOnet, DementedNet, and was co-founder of an ANSI art group, SNaP! The people I BBS'd with were local people, and I often met them in real life.
By the mid 90's, most of my friends were switching over to the commercial multi-line chat MBBS's. Cheers, The Imperial Fortress, Excalibur, etc. While I waxed nostalgic about the old one-line BBS's sitting in a chat room with thirty people on TIF, I didn't know how short that form of community's lifespan would be. After 96, I worked for Cheersoft, a company that wrote utilities and doors for MBBS/Worldgroup. At that point the internet was taking over most of the local BBS scene. The one-liners were dying, and the 50-100 liners were becoming mom and pop ISP's. It was sad, in a way, working in part of a scene that was dying. But the BBS scene was one of the greatest things I was involved with, and I had tons of fun. One of my best friends from high school married a girl that we met on a BBS years ago. Some of my good friends to this day are people I met back in the mid 90's on BBSes.
The thing I miss the most about it all is the geographical closeness, as another poster mentioned. One night sitting in the Worldgroup teleconference, some girl expressed interest in pizza. Within an hour, a dozen of us had driven all over Jersey to make it to a pizza place. I can't do that with people as easily over the internet. Local BBS's would do photoshoots with the sysop's girlfriend or other random female users, then post up the bikini pix on other sites to advertise their BBS. You would call these BBS's, knowing you could score with them.
A group of former BBS'ers in central jersey have formed a very Linux-friendly telnetable BBS at darkplanet.org. If you were part of the community back in the day in that area, you might just run into a few dozen old faces.
DXgaming has a copy running which isn't so polluted with problems and rampant cheating.
No sig is worth reading.
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
In some places it's Perkins instead of Denny's.
I ran RoboBoard and Robo/FX at one point in my BBSes career (The Cauldron, out of Eastern Ontario, and eventually Saltspring Island BC) and loved it. The company that produced it is still around - producing excellent website and network monitoring tools. I use their Livestats on one of my websites.
Roboboard was truly cutting edge for its time, offering full GUI and graphical interfaces at a time when most BBSes were stuck in ANSI - although it gave that option too. It was also a wonderful package to configure. Nicely designed overall.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
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.