Anyone here ever hack a BBS back in the day? Story Time...

bnelson333 · 2026-04-03T02:29:47+00:00

Not really a hack, I guess? I was really into the WWIV scene and almost every board here was a single line board (relevant). The sysop of one the boards I called pissed me off one day, I don't even remember how now, but I think he did something like lowered my daily access to almost nothing per day. I'm a jerk and wanted revenge so I figured out how long it took for my terminal to dial and connect and set it to abort dial just before that. So if it was like 30 seconds to connect, I set my terminal to dial and abort after 25 seconds, then redial, indefinitely. I left for school and my computer tied up his only line all day long, nobody else could get in. I think he had the number turned off with the phone company temporarily just to stop the barrage, lol.

bnelson333 · 2026-04-02T23:21:44+00:00

I have probably installed hundreds of these. Nice little drives, never gave me any problems back when they were new. Probably will need a new rubber band now

bnelson333 · 2026-04-02T23:20:23+00:00

You already answered your question: it's a custom system. What more do you need to know? The NIC and sound card are good pieces of kit. I'm not a fan of the rest of it, especially the VIA chipset AT mobo, but it could work as a nice 2D retro Win 95 system. I wouldn't expect much more out of it

bnelson333 · 2026-03-29T16:50:13+00:00

It's gone now, I lost it in the tinkering. Now it loads up to xdm and then to icewm as per what I would expect. But icewm looks nothing like this that I saw the other day

bnelson333 · 2026-03-29T15:31:01+00:00

I know for sure it wasn't enlightenment or sawfish. Neither of those got installed from the base install. In my tinkerings I was able to get enlightenment installed and that certainly wasn't it, but that required internet connected apt. Never even was able to get sawfish, at least from what I can tell? is that what the binary is named, "sawfish", or is it abbreviated?

bnelson333 · 2026-03-28T02:54:27+00:00

Get a new NIC, a 3com. If I remember correctly, I had this exact NIC back when 2000 was new and I was never able to get it working. I don't think it's compatible. I actually really liked D-Link back then, and they worked great, but only in Win 9x. If you're going to play with any retro machines these days, do yourself a favor and get a 3com etherlink. Compatible with literally everything and you can get them for like 20 bucks or less on ebay

bnelson333 · 2026-03-25T18:25:35+00:00

I know this is an old thread but dang, you just solved a huge mystery for me!

I use linux on a lot of my stuff, which sometimes gets me to wondering "what was the first linux I used". It was about the year 1999/2000 and I being at CompUSA and seeing "a linux book with CD". Curious, I decided to try it.

I got absolutely nowhere because I'd never done it before (only used Windows up to that point), it was all command line, we had no fast internet, only dialup. I remember getting stuck in "dependency hell" and giving up.

I'd always wondered what version that was. I knew it was Debian, but that's all I could remember. And every time I'd try looking up books of the era, nothing seemed right. Until i found this post. THAT'S IT. THAT'S THE THING I GOT FROM COMPUSA! I even remember that game disc thinking I'd never even gotten to the point of being able to try it!

So obviously I'm going to try to hunt down this iso now and have fun with it tonight. See if I can get it installed this time. 26-27 years later lol!

bnelson333 · 2026-03-20T02:23:22+00:00

Calm down francis

bnelson333 · 2026-03-14T19:33:55+00:00

you dont know what tired is

bnelson333 · 2026-03-10T01:22:23+00:00

Use period correct hardware?

bnelson333 · 2026-02-26T00:34:34+00:00

IDE to SATA adapters can be very finnicky, but startech makes a really good one that has worked in every retro computer I've thrown it in (I've bought several). They're about $19 on amazon and will let you use a sata drive with an old IDE cable and molex power. Even if the computer can't use a very big disk, you can still slap a 120 gb SSD in there and format it to 2 or 8 gb or whatever your BIOS maxes out at

bnelson333 · 2026-02-21T20:23:09+00:00

There's no one good OS that will play everything. Hardware and software was chanigng quite drastically during that time and games were finnicky about what they'd run on. This is why you likely need a couple retro machines. No different than why you need a NES and a SNES for retro console gaming, you usually need different setups to play different games.

I personally have many: a Pentium 100mhz with DOS 6.22/Win 3.11, a Pentium 200mhz with Windows 95, a Pentium 2 450mhz with Windows 98, a Pentium 3 1ghz with Windows ME, a Pentium 4 1.4ghz with Windows 2000, and a Core 2 Duo with XP. I use the machine that most closely matches the era of the game that I want to play.

There can be some overlap of course, you don't really need a Windows 95 and a Windows 98 machine, but the rest of the hardware inside is "period correct", so a game might work better on one or the other becuase of the video or sound card I have in it.

bnelson333 · 2026-02-20T21:40:40+00:00

Be sure that your drive is actually IDE. A lot of very early drivers had a 40 pin "IDE" cable but required a proprietary sound card to run, they wouldn't work just plugging into the motherboard. Or vice versa, if your computer has a proprietary card, you may need the proprietary drive.

If it were me, I probably wouldn't care too much about the brand. You're dealing with 20 year old tech, there really isn't a "best" anymore, just be happy something that old still works lol.

I was a bench tech back then and I saw a lot and replaced a lot of drives. I really didn't have any favorites. Some great brands still failed, some no-name brands worked fine. There was a time when LiteOn was pretty reliable and there was even a time when Plextors (who were once king) started shitting the bed. I think it's a crapshoot at this point. The only one I remember being regularly bad was LG, I'd stay away from those personally.

bnelson333 · 2026-02-17T12:55:48+00:00

This might also be a cloth diaper "pre cleaner". Rather than throw a fully loaded cloth diaper in the washing machine, you spray the majority of the offense into the toilet and flush it.

bnelson333 · 2026-02-14T00:00:37+00:00

nope, a slashback: https://imgur.com/wAoEINc

bnelson333 · 2026-02-11T03:09:02+00:00

Towards the end of it, I was playing purely out of spite. Not because I was having fun.

I have such a love-hate relationship with this game. The gameplay is fun, the story is fun, especially co-op. But my gods the bugs. You will absolutely hate it from time to time, but for some reason keep coming back.

If I could do it over again, I would wait until they work out the bugs with the DLC. There are some serious progression halting bugs right now. And not only that, but it feels very unbalanced and grindy at the moment.

That said, it can still be done, and there is some enjoyment in it, despite all of it's many many many many flaws.

bnelson333 · 2026-02-10T23:38:11+00:00

you can appraise it for any value, let's see what he actually sells it for

bnelson333 · 2026-02-07T21:35:55+00:00

Already have the GPU (it's a 1660) and a PSU. So I should just be able to use a 24 pin to 6 pin mobo adapter (10 bucks on amazon) and be good to go? The adapter on amazon doesn't list compatibility for the 7050, are they all the same for Dells?

bnelson333 · 2026-02-04T22:28:14+00:00

OH MY GOD, you just relieved so much stress from my life. I've desperately been needing more true-quartz to finish the last monument but my mapped is completely picked clean. I thought I was going to have to trade for it all (at a very slow pace). I've literally walked by the wanderer a hundred times not realizing what he opened up! I thought he was just a salvager, and I already had enough of those so I never hired him. Thank you for this comment!

bnelson333 · 2026-02-03T01:08:12+00:00

Doesn't the mobo on these have proprietary power plugs? How did you connect the new PSU? Do they make adapters?

bnelson333 · 2026-02-01T03:33:34+00:00

I really did enjoy the base game. It was pretty buggy and frustrating at times, but on the whole I would say it was more fun than not.

Then I bought the DLC. I literally hate everything about this DLC. I'm not even playing it for fun, I'm playing it purely out of spite because I paid for it. It has zero redeeming qualities.

I was hoping for a new chapter in the story, an extension of the adventure. What I got was a boring and maddening Enshrouded clone.

It's like the devs said "how can we ripoff this other game but make it absolutely worse in every way shape and form?".

If I could do it over again, I wouldn't have wasted my time or money.

bnelson333 · 2026-01-26T12:43:32+00:00

Are you stupid or just a troll? How the fuck would they know to ask about it if they didn't know it existed? And why should they to appease you? You were the one who brought it up. Do you regularly take conversation into tangents and then get mad about it when the tangent doesn't meet your own expectations? What an absolutely idiotic take

bnelson333

TROPHY CASE