[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Building a better BBS




That was the fun of building a BBS. How can I take these disparate tools and combine them to provide a better user experience. Or, how can I combine them to do something totally useless, that is still a technical accomplishment; ie: Using my Apple-Cat to turn the stereo and lights on and off from a remote location via touch tone dialing and optical relays.

25 years later, I still find the same fascination with putting together the pieces, and writing code to make this little box do new things. Innovations like CFFA and Virtual ][, Ciderpress, ADT and tcpser only help to fuel the fire.

What I see brewing is a growing sentiment from old sysops that would like to revive some of their old boards and put them online for the A2 community to enjoy. If for no other reason than to have some technology for which to tinker. As I am sure many of the old messages are still in tact (I still have many from years of BBSing), it might make for an interesting museum.

Although I don't see any real revenue stream from this hobby, I bet there are enough old sysops lurking here and elsewhere to put together a collaborative project.

What about opening up METAL and seeing what the community can do with it?

BZ

a2aviator@gmail.com wrote:
I've got the METAL source and 'rights' if you can call it that. At one
time I had requested that it be moved on ground, to a more proper
location within the archive and their response was to remove it
totally. So there it sat... gone.

I've not been really motivated to do much with it since.

Once I did think about returning The Space Bar to the airwaves, but
until I started actually selling Focus drives again- based on CF
cards, the thought of what to use for a storage medium was a constant
worry. The thought of an emulator that can be backed up "just like
that" vs. having to deal with the worry of a corrupting hard drive
becoming a  time sink later on.

Over the years I had a blast doing PTSE stuff, hacking the 'space
invaders' clone to work on a character by character basis instead of
line by line, doing a Pole Position game (Turbo Run)..

Or the years of hooking up internal and external modems to the Apple //
e and then IIgs so that one could have both an Apple-Cat (Cat-Send)
and AE Pro or similar on the same line. The BBS would answer at 300
baud with the Apple-Cat II first, since it could answer on half a ring
and pick up  before the Hayes modem did. If a connection was not
negotiated at either Bell 103 or '202' then the modem driver would do
ATA and when the Apple-Cat II detected that line picked up and heard
the carrier from the Hayes, it hung up. The 1200, 2400 and then later
on 9600/HST carriers would negotiate in that order.

If you connected at '202', you had some special modes when using Cat-
Term or the modified AE Pro, that would do speed changes to support
the higher speed bursts of '202' (half duplex 1200) that the Apple-Cat
offered.

The BBS, at the main input/output routine, if the connection type was
internal modem and the speed available was '202', it would GOSUB to a
different routine that integrated &SPEED=202, &SPEED=103 at the
appropriate times. So text on the message bases would go over at Apple-
Cat speed and then it would switch back for text input.