Re: BBS Preservation Archive

[jefbla@bconnex.net (Jeff Blakeney)]

On 20 Apr 1997 00:38:01 -0700, nickb@primenet.com (Nick S Bensema)
wrote:

>Since most old IBM or Apple boards ran plain ASCII as far as I can tell,
>archiving their contents is easy.  Might even rake up a few buried
>treasures for the local ASCII Art archive.  But most C64 and Atari 8-bit
>boards, and I'm told CoCo boards as well, had graphics and/or color that
>could be typed into messages.  To archive these message bases would
>require either stripping the graphics out, converting them to GIFs
>(un-economical for an entire message base I think), or programming
>PETSCII and ATASCII plug-ins for Netscape and IE.  Welcome screens and
>such, perhaps even menus, would work great as GIFs, but you can't GIF a
>whole message base, I don't think.  Well, it might work in ATASCII which
>was monochrome, but probably not PETSCII so much.

Another way to display the colour/graphic type displays would be to
write a CGI script that created GIFs on the fly.  It could even be
animated using server push/pull or whatever its called.

For example to display a logon to a C64 board, your CGI script would
create a new GIF and start filling in the image portion by simply
copying bitmaps of each character using the appropriate colours to
each screen location in the image.  Once this image is done it can be
sent to the browser.

To display the next line, the CGI script could copy all but the top
screen line of the image being display to the top of the image and
fill in the bottom line with the appropriate line from the log file.

It might be possible to do this using Java as well but I haven't
looked at Java yet so I can't tell you.

Just something you might want to think about.