FyBBS

[FyberOptic]

Anyone who was using computers 10+ years ago or so might remember the BBS days.  In particular, you might remember playing the game LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon).  Since I figured it had to be possible to play it again these days without a BBS, I set out to find how to do it.  Now you'd think that to preserve the old days, people running modern BBS's would share how they managed to get such games working, but they've decided to keep their scripts secret.  So I wrote it all myself!  And I'll share all my findings here soon.  For now, to connect and try it out, use:

telnet://fyber.is-a-geek.com:19000    (paste this into your browser since apparently the board won't consider it an url)

Just sign up with whatever name/pass you want, then once it gets into the game you can tell it what you really want to be called.  I reckon I worked out all the bugs, but WHO KNOWS?  Keep in mind that this is running off of my old laptop since my website server here surely wouldn't have enough ram for all the DOS emulation sessions, so I hope it doesn't get slow when many people connect.

I might see if I can get LORD2, Planets, and DOZ running sometime too.  I'll also add a Java telnet client or something to a page on the site here so that folks don't have to use the telnet app everytime they wanna connect.


UPDATE:  There's a java client linked on the front page of the site now, but it doesn't look quite as good as a standard telnet client.  So I'd prolly only use it if you truly have nothing else, or if you're lazy!

[FyberOptic]

I did a big overhaul today to make the software more secure, efficient, and capable of running multiple door games, and went ahead and marked it as v0.75.  The problem however is that games like LORD2 rely on the extended ascii character set, which at this point I don't know how to make work under DOSEMU (a DOS emulator for Linux).  So for the moment, the only game available is still LORD.  I bet Planets would work, though . . !

[FyberOptic]

* FyberOptic keeps making post after post

I recompiled DOSEMU to display ANSI graphics faster, and put up Planets: The Exploration of Space (since it ran at a snail's pace before the recompile).  'Tis another game from Seth Able; most folks call it TEOS or Planets for short.  LORD should run a bit faster now, too!

[Boris]

I've played LORD before, but planets is a new one on me. It weren't too hard to figure out though, so~

[FyberOptic]

It's fun~

LORD now updates twice a day; still midnight like normal, but then a seperate program runs at noon which tricks it into thinking it's a new day.  The only problem with this is that the game will start to think it's been running twice as many days (due to the extra maintenance cycle a day).  This doesn't really affect anything, but keep that in mind whenever you view the game info.

[Boris]

I'm much batter at that spaceshippery game. I killed mets in one hit rather than it being the other way around like in LORD...

Twice updates is better without being overwhelming.

[FyberOptic]

I made several improvements so I bumped the FyBBS code version to 0.76.  Most notably, I wrote a custom input routine to both: limit the cpu usage while waiting for input, and check for a time-out.  The latter means that if you sit there at the menu for 3 minutes without typing anything, it'll kick you off.  The other improvements should improve the general speed, since it's really been getting bogged down.

[FyberOptic]

It now drops you back to the menu after you exit a game, and I added a Quit option to there to disconnect when you're done.

[Boris]

Hopefully that'll prevent the odd 'uncloseable telnet window' syndrome I've gotten a couple of times.

OH YEAH AND HE ADDED LORD2. Never did track down what was causing it to spit the wrong characters out sometimes. So you look like an ascii toilet seat instead of an ascii smileyface. Works really nice anyway.

[FyberOptic]

lol he's right, it is in fact using the toilet seat character instead of the smiley face for your player icon.

[FyberOptic]

I wrote some software to read the LORD player.dat and display an almost identical player ranking window, so that you don't even have to log into the BBS.  I put a link on the main BBS page, but you can get to it fralm here too.

Since the BBS isn't actually on the same server as the site, the stats aren't real-time, unfortunately.  I've considered trying to see how well the BBS would actually run on my web server, but I'm guessing not good (due to lack of ram).  So I have it configured to upload the player.dat every 5 minutes, so that it's at least semi-real-time.

[Theddy]

LORD is verry fun, too bad I couldn't try the other ones. It's totally like Legend of the Green Dragon though. Good work Fyber.

[FyberOptic]

I made a whole new section and moved this topic here so we can discuss the BBS games and all that hot stuff.

[Ciono]

I <3 LORD 2. But I keep dying.  Oh well, what are ya gonna do.

[Prox]

I love Lord 2, but how the heck am I going to get 100 alignment...?!