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Commodore BBSes Return using the Internet.
oldbitcollector writes "Several Commodore 64 enthusiasts have developed a method for putting Commodore BBS sytems on the Internet. Users can "dial" using a standard 64 connected to the Internet or by using a "CG Term" for the PC. Details can be found here."
No VIC-20 support? Darn, and I've even got a tape drive.
Just what the world needs-- more underpowered computers connected to the internet so that we can all DoS *ahem* I mean Slashdot them.
Hip hip Horray!
What's with that period? It makes the headline seem so...threatening, ominous.
I belong to the ______ generation.
One has to wonder about an implimentation for "fringe" computers when the website (http://www.petscii.com/) supports IE but only gives a blank page if opened in Netscape.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
HAH! my 28.8 modem days finally pay off! now I actually can do something that people with broadband can't do. there is nothing like a carrier signal to lift the sprits.
How can this be very useful? The C64 has about 32K of useable RAM and about an 800K floppy... am I missing something, have they come up with larger mass storage systems for the C64 or something?
(This isn't intended as a troll or flamebait... it's a genuine question....)
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
are they "secure" like the old bbs' were?
everyone knows that a bbs attracts conspiratist theorists like flies to fido spread over 5km of freewaysomewhere, on a Big Red Sign:
if(color==blue){speed--;}
Wow, this brings back memories. I ran a BBS for years, Bladerunner BBS. It started out running on an Osborne Executive (2400 BPS! 2 double-sided quad density drives!) and then was upgraded to an Atari ST (20 MB SCSI HD, 19,200 BPS Telebit Trailblazer!). The amusing thing was that the CPU in the Trailblazer was much faster than the ST itself.
One thing I really miss from those days is the sense of community, and the games. I ran a number of games on my BBS, and it was always a lot of fun watching people interact. Unlike modern online games, anyone could write a test-oriented BBS game if they knew a little BASIC, so there were all sorts of cool games. I remember in particular a drag racing game where you could race, earn money, buy upgrades, and compete against other drivers (i.e. other players on the same BBS). The integration of the game into real-time was fascinating -- most BBS games let you make a limited number of moves a day, so people would play a single session of a game for _weeks_. And there were tons of cool timing tricks, like dialing into the BBS at 11:30 so that you'd have the last move before midnight and then the first game after midnight, which could give you a nice advantage (and leave you vulnerable as everyone else moves after you).
Hey, thanks for the excuse for the flashback. Fun days!
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
And just in case there was any lingering doubt that Slashdot editors might not derive some sort of malignant glee from watching servers go down, now we are posting links to COMMODORE 64s! C'mon, let's be more forthcoming - News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters, Harnessing the Power of Geeks to Set Protozoan Servers on Fire. BOO-YAH!
A Commodore 64 BBS is not the same over a high speed connection. I long for the days of my 300 baud modem when I could read the text in real time as it came across my TV screen. It was all down hill after the 1200 baud modems came out.
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
You really need to look into this more, a 33Mhz system with a 14.4 modem actually has a lot of uses. It'd make a decent (but very low bandwith) home firewall, for one.
Just because it's old doesn't mean it's not useful!
10 PRINT "FUCK"
20 PRINT "YOU"
30 GOTO 10
END
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
It's really kinda sad.
I'm all for nostalgia in some minor way but when do you let it rest? I wonder how many guys are out there praising this move who, the day after they got their x86, were trashing the C=64?
I still own a working Amiga but even I've come to the point that I'm asking myself; what for? It was great in the day but the day's over. Stop playing Trade Wars and play some MOH so I have another newb I can kick in the nuts...
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
(And there're a lot of old BBSes available through telnet, though I dunno about C64-based ones.)
Been using sigs for 20 years. Nothing funny left to say.
Heres something that might give you a c64 flash back.
:) :)
;)
GOOGOOACKACKBADBAD
Punter
Xmodem-1K and Ymodem-1K
300 Baud modems you pluged your sound into.
Sixpack (s2g), Arj, Lha
4 pixel wide 80 column display on a 40 column terminal
4 color ansi (And of course Petascii)
Burping Number 5.
Dual Sid, playing Skate or Die, Sids rule
Speedload Cartridges, (My fav the Snapshot)
GEOS and Quantumlink
Peek and Poke
Compiled Basic
Atari 2600 joysticks
Am I missing anything else? Other than almost every BBS being written in compiled basic, some where written in C. The Amiga where BBS's compiled in C was the rave. Moving on UP. I remember before I got my Amiga, I upgraded to a C128 so I could do real 80 column ANSI, for almost a year during school, I had at least a real ANSI term, DesTerm I recall, even had real zmodem.
Rusty and Eddies!
Ok, I should stop now before I go on about moving to PC playing Tradewars on WWIV BBS's and Galaciticom (Before they turned into ISP software.)
The BBS scene has turned into the IRC scene, now it seems to be the IM scene. Blogs are there too, but I was blogging before it was blogs, so Im blogged out. (Or is Slashdot a BLOG?)
"Know your roots!"
AT&F&C1&D2
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
I cut my BBSing teeth on boards pulled from that very BBS listing in TC. Used to wait excitedly for the "Big BBS List" to come out every now and then. :)
It used a single sided 3.5" floppy exactly like the double sided ones we have for PCs now.
Was I the ONLY kid on the block who had one of those drives?
Back in the old days I bragged about having a combined storage of 1.5 megabytes online! lol. Man, now I have 2 terabytes on 2 networked PCs...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Actually, it's a very secure system to go on the internet with, for one thing: even the smallest Windows virus won't fit in 32K.
Not quite true. One counterexample: Win32.Driller, a memory-resident virus which is 8K in size.
The coolest voice ever.
We've been running a Commodore like BBS program on a BSD box for a number of years. It's called The Shack and you can get to it by just a CLICK!
It's been a fun project and we hope to continue it's development whenever spare time is available.
It's been done. 2002. Just not up now, unless it is running at another address somewhere.
But I haven't heard of any earlier Apple IIs being accessible via Telnet, and not any `GBBS "Pro"' systems.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
I, too, loved Citadels. Something about the no nonesense approach, just text messages will all those lovely, lovely ROOMS to explore. You can, of course, still find them around today. Whether they have the same feel/flavor is an entirely different subject, of course. Check out the Uncensored! BBS at uncensored.citadel.org. It is running Citadel/UX on a Linux system so you can still feel proud to check it out, even if you're too young to have experienced BBSing the first time around.
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
I take it you never heard of Textfiles.com.
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
Flat out wrong.
Where we've been determines where we're going. "Those who don't pay attention to history are doomed to repeat it" and all that. Use that machine, so you can see why things developed the way they did - maybe you'll avoid some of the miskates made prior to you.
That 33/66 you have contains half of the reasons things are the way they are now. Your new Athlon64 can run DOS, after all, just like the old stuff. Study the older machines, friend, they'll show you much about today's "new" technology.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Having writen BBS programs for the Vic20. C64 and C128 (Actually same program evolved as I switched systems.. Also ported to Dos and would have gone to Linux but the BBS died on Dos as the phone company ripped out the wires to my phone line and offered to charge me to fix there own mistake.
Intrestingly enough I wasn't supprised to discovere I had no callers. I was only supprised as to WHY)
If the trick is handled all on the PC side (and I expect it is) then it dosen't matter.
If they are doing it the way I think
(Commodore userport to RS232 to null modem to PC sereal (rs232) then PC forwards to telnet etc...) this should also work on the Vic20.
For that matter it should also work for CP/M, Apple II, TSR-80. Pritty much any old BBS.
Dos BBSes can be done on the same Linux or Windows box that provides the Internet access making it much easier.
I don't actually exist.
YOU SEE A RED DOOR TO THE NORTH
(I called my character A RED DOOR TO THE NORTH)
> Open red door
I DO NOT SEE A RED DOOR HERE.
A RED DOOR TO THE NORTH STRIKES YOU, INFLICTING 30 DAMAGE.
(I also liked to call my character "1l1l1lll11")
Is not a new thing.
Jay | http://oldos.org
I remember my C=64 with fondness. I should, I paid $495 or so...
There was a guy I found who was building 1 meg of RAM expansion slots, I thought I was on top of the world. And when i got my 3.5" 1.44 Mb floppy drive I almost peed my pants.
I forget the program, but I set up my C=64 to be a BBS for the real estate office I worked in. You could NOT tell you weren't on a PC (286/386) of the period.
I wrote my first book on that machine, printed it out on a Star printer, and published it.
And there WERE a few BBSs around with more than one phone line, not to mention a national BBS I think called Q-Link(?). I took courses on that big BBS up in Virginia(?) with a dozen other peolple on line. And who could forget "Windy City BBS"?
Commodore was unbelievably stupid, and made some things harder for programmers. For example, the C-64 and C-128 computers both had a software-emulated UART chip, instead of a real one (to save money, as I understand it, about $5), limiting the baud rate to how fast the computer could process code in what was called a "non-maskable interrupt". The C-64 allowed a max of 1200 baud. The C-128, because it could run at double the clock speed of the C-64 ("Fast Mode", or about 2Mhz), could in theory run at 2400 baud, but you had to write your own version of the UART emulator using well-optimized machine language. Faster connection speeds were out of the question.
As the author of a few C-64 programs (e.g., "Prototerm"), I can't tell you how many times I wanted to drive to West Chester, and strangle someone. Nowadays, of course, I periodically get the urge to strangle a person or two in Redmond. Fortunately, it's too long a drive.
Nothing every changes, just the names and faces.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
READY
LOAD "HTTP://WWW./PETSCII.COM/",8,1
HTTP 404 SITE NOT FOUND
READY
so anyway, I just had to add this little bit to get aroung the lameness filter. So, how's that Internet thing doing?
JET Program: see Japan, meet intere
...they better be limiting the throughput to 300baud. Good old days when you could read "in real time" ie. you could read as fast as the data came through the modem - no need for this scroll bar bullshit.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I've been waiting for Commodore BBSes to return to the net for a long time.
The thing I liked the most about Commodore BBSes was the color and graphics. Every BBS had little custom color schemes and graphical flourishes here and there. And, of course, the phreakers' boards had the most flamboyant designs. With the popularity of ASCII art today, you can just imagine what Commodore users could accomplish with PETSCII, and what Atari users could accomplish with ATASCII now that you mention it.
Color64 and C-net boards had a charm that was hard to match.
I've got the Assembler cartridge! But I can't remember the entry point to run it. Back to read data, poke data looping. :(
Yeah..
First BBS I logged into was a DYM BBS.. I was too young to log in and I lied.
It didn't work out.
Then I logged into the Forth BBS in SanFransisco. Your command prompt was actually in forth.
The way forth works is you can add commands so the BBS fuctions were just new commands. I think they locked off the programming features (makes sense but I never tried to edit the BBS so I don't know).
I remeber the ongoing story of Murphy Law of folly forth. I just folowed the story as it progressed. "Folow the yellow diod"...
(Being an impressionable kid I actually refered to going to the bathroom as "dumping my buffers" for a while. As in "I gotta go dump my buffers" while dancing the "gotta go to da bathroom" dance)
Later I had access to some RCP/M and RBBS bbses. The downloads section was just dropping you to a secured prompt.. (think restricted Unix shell where you can't do much) run xmodem filename.ext and then download the files you wanted.
I always thought of Commodore BBSes as limited but secure. Oh boy I had everyone and there brother trying to prove that wasn't the case. Nobody ever hacked into my BBS but I knew it had nothing to do with Commodore.
It was that I wrote the program and every time someone TRIED to hack in I changed the code.
(Staying one step ahead is the ONLY way).
There were three reasons people tried to hack my BBS.
1. I once called it uncrashable. I never did that again once it went into a crash recrash loop.
2. I was sereous about the no cuss words policy (that went away when I hit 18. Mommy might not approve)
3. I ran my BBS on a Commodore 128.
Actually worse than that MY software tried to addapt to the user and often failed.
So I had people hacking my BBS who thought I had an Apple II, a TRS 80, a PC and any number of platforms people didn't like.
I also had one guy yell at me becouse his 300 baud modem connected to my 1200 baud as a 300 baud.
(Some 300 baud modems let you go faster but the other side has to have the same kind of modem and support the hack. I didn't)
And then there was the guy who accused me of stealing his BBS look.
(His was a brand new BBS and I know my BBS changed it's apperence at least twice while he was online just to accomidate his poking and proding)
But that was the worst of it.
However when I want to remember the good old days I log into my Linux box and go into the command line.
Then I smile.
Then I type the old forth BBS commands and they don't work.
I don't actually exist.
Our school uses an old mainframe and a 9600 baud modem to handle the registration of ~20000 students.
...my very first introduction to local Commodore BBS's was shortly after I purchased a Datalink 2400 internal modem for my Apple IIGS.
One of my dad's coworker friends ran a board called "The Ivory Tower", and passed the info along to me. Let me tell ya, up until that time, I had no idea how my life was going to change. I miss the small community feel of old BBS's like "The Ivory Tower".
I remember also the frustration of hearing those blasted 'busy' signals when trying to call up a popular board. As I made my way around the various BBS's of Knoxville, TN, I came across "The Volunteer BBS" -- it was one of my favorite hang-outs -- it was a PC based BBS, but they had great online games like Millway's Casino and Tradewars 2002. With the Internet being so global, it's getting harder to find such cozy little places to hang out anymore.
Bring back Millway's Casino!
The PC Weenies: 11 Years of Online Tech 'Too
...is a 2 meg Flash animation that mimics letters slowly appearing on a green screen at 300 baud.
W E L C O M E
T O
T H E
C O M M O D O R E
P I R A T E 'S D E N
1> Warez 2>Chat 3>BBS System
>?
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
My parents got an Apple ][+ with a 300 baud modem when I was in third grade, back in 1982. I remember the "Cracked" screens with the phone numbers for the BBSs of the pirates who had cracked the games I was playing (Drol, Snack Attack, Taipan, Escape to Atlantis). I also found local 'boards' where I would read what everyone who had logged on before me had posted in the various 'rooms' that I was interested in and I would reply appropriately. I can't remember downloading any warez, though early pr0n was available on CompuServe and my friend John and I racked up an inexcusably large bill after 'downloading' all night. My best friend Jason and I convinced our parents to buy us Mac 512s in 1985, when we were in 7th grade. Jason's parents moved during junior high and he got a second phone line installed and started running a BBS on a Mac Plus he'd picked up for the purpose.
I remember me and the other geeks who logged on (and who spent time redialing when somebody else was tying up the single phone line) pushing the BBS software Jason was running to the limit; the big hit was being able to fuck with the text display and simulate "animation" by forcing the page of text you were reading to refresh by issuing different backslashes in the text posts. Dumb shit that would take over your text display until it played itself out, but which was amusing nervertheless.
It's an awesome idea to transmorgify the internet to a C64 BBS, but just imagine a website that tracks either realtime (i.e.. http://npds-tracker.continuity.cx:3680) or better yet just lists possible BBSs and lets people with the old school hardware break it out and dial up to phone numbers that might or might not be busy. There's nothing quite like the end user experience of old BBS software whatever the OS it ran on; I propose the excitement is better created by setting up real BBSs on original hardware as a better alternative to trying to connect old, old boxes to the internet. I for one would consider the thankless process of getting an additional phone line to set up a dial-up BBS on my trusty Mac Plus (formerly a Mac 512 before my roommate pour a beer through it when I cut him off on Tetris) with a HD20 and a 33.6 modem should the demand be there (and methinks it probably isn't).
Wouldn't it best be experienced as it was originally experienced?
End of Line
Several folks have mentioned that they miss that 'sense of community' that BBSs brought - well it's not like you can't get that sort of community anymore. There are still plenty of BBSs out there that _do_ have an active community of users. OSUNY ssh://osuny.co.uk is one of them. BBSs are still your friend. :)
Both you and the parent poster obviously don't have any actual experience with the machines. I ran a bulletin board on a C-64 using a 2400 baud modem for years. Further more, the local computer shop ran a massive multi-user bulletin board a couple years later and all the computers in the store were hooked to it. The Amigas were connected at 56k and worked flawlessly as such.