SYNCTERM NIGHTLY FULL
SYNCTERM NIGHTLY WINDOWS

A locally-run cross-platform option for connecting to BBS's is SyncTERM. fTelnet lets you connect to Bulletin Board Systems from the comfort of your browser. You may know Rick from his fTelnet browser based app.

SYNCTERM NIGHTLY WINDOWS

Rick Parrish has a BBS door game server for Windows and Linux that he's written in open source C# called GameSrv. It'll act as a front-end and accept telnet connections before passing them off to the DOS BBS software. GameSrv can be used to bring your old DOS based BBS server into the new millennium.

So the question is, could we play DOS-based 16-bit Door Games today? Yes. TradeWars was the Elite Dangerous of the BBS set. TradeWars is/was the most well-known Door Game and we'd play it for months. When the game extended, the BBS picked up the phone and kept the connection. Door Games were ASCII/ANSI games that the BBS would shell out to, passing the connection over. You might also want to telnet:// for ASCII-based Star Wars! Originally we would call (like literally dial-up one to one) a BBS but ubiquitous internet added telnet as a nice option that persists today. You can try setting up what I'm going to describe in this post, or you can try telnet'ing to a BBS like the CaveBBS here: telnet://. Why? Because it's awesome and history is lovely.

SYNCTERM NIGHTLY FULL

I'll do a more extensive post later and I'm going to turn this into a full conference talk, but for the demo I ran a few BBS Door Games under Windows 10. I did a lightning talk this week at NDC London where I started with a text file that included a CR/LF, Git autocrlf, then talked about typewriters, what a Carriage really is, then the Teletype Model 33, the Altair 8800, the ASCII chart, then ANSI art, and finally moved on to BBS's and BBS Door Games. I continue to enjoy seeing what can be done with WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) but even more fun is combining CMD.exe (the Windows console), Ubuntu on Windows (WSL), and DOSBox (an x86 emulator that lets you run OLD programs in original DOS that no longer run natively on Windows).

Syncterm nightly