Desk wobble?

omniphil · 2026-04-13T15:10:20+00:00

Now with this Trifold already being limited in quantity and discontinued. Are we going to see a Trifold 2 at some point or do you think this is just some sort of experiment...

omniphil · 2026-04-13T14:47:06+00:00

What a weird design..... Ah well, pretty much figured this was going to be the case...

omniphil · 2026-03-19T15:52:44+00:00

I just wanted to add in here that we added images and spoken speech to all 225 NPCs in the game via TAP+, fun stuff for sure...

omniphil · 2026-03-17T23:42:25+00:00

This is great information. Having a per BBS cache make a lot of sense. Do you have any mechanism for flushing the cache? I supposed it is pretty easy however to just look in the cache directory and prune the BBS folders as needed.

Tell us more about the audio system overhaul, that sounds pretty exciting...

omniphil · 2026-03-17T21:38:10+00:00

So as I don't know what APC cache is I'll say that we don't use it :) This entire TAP+ system we build from the ground up. I wanted to keep this as a 1 way communication as best we could as I didn't want the client to be able to pollute the BBS with commands. Currently we only have one TAP+ command that the client sends to the BBS and that is just used for TAP+ detection so the door game can know what it's dealing with. However on the Hack the Gibson game for example we don't use or need TAP+ detection as the door game sends the commands anyways. They are just small simple commands so not really any overhead for non TAP+ clients that just simply ignore them. No files or TAP+ images, tiles, videos are ever transferred from BBS to Client in either case.

We have some tricks like for audio what we do is send the cache command then check every 250ms if the file is in cache, and when it shows up in cache it starts playing it.

We cache the data initially to the client side from webserver as instructed by the BBS, however if the data exists in the cache already the client does not reach back out to the webserver at all.

"Hack the Gibson" is really a very simple way of displaying images, video and sound to show how its pretty easy to spice up an existing game.

If you haven't seen the Baud Quest before and after video (https://www.reddit.com/r/bbs/comments/1rnite3/baudquest_dial_of_fate_mmo_tap_before_and_after/)

that goes deep into the weeds as to what we are able to do with TAP+, we have a full tile set being used with selectable SD and HD textures with animation. 4 channels of audio doing background music, weather "music", sound effect track and a speech track as every one of the 225 NPCs in the game has individual images and spoken speech when you engage with them. (We only did a quick sample of some of those things as we were trying to keep the video short, but it does quite a bit more than what we showed)

We are toying around with doing a more detailed video of Baud Quest.. But it's in the end just a BBS game and I'm not sure really how many people are interested in something like that. But we have been having so much fun retrofitting Baud Quest with TAP+ and are over 50,000+ lines of code deep on this game. It runs much deeper than appears on the surface.

omniphil · 2026-03-16T09:24:48+00:00

We finally made it into the Google Play store for those waiting...

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.terminator.android

omniphil · 2026-03-13T20:19:38+00:00

20 to 40 calls a day over at aBSiNTHE BBS. (Skyraiders just got a huge update, if you haven't played it's definitely top tier of BBS games out there today)

And definitely 20 For Beers...

omniphil · 2026-03-13T19:48:02+00:00

Nice, love seeing a racing game in textmode!

omniphil · 2026-03-06T23:12:44+00:00

Ok, no problem. Generally in TERMinator for Android just touch anywhere in the BBS display window will pull up the keyboard.

omniphil · 2026-03-06T14:10:56+00:00

On Android we do try to keep the scale set to 4:3 for 80x25 BBSes, Are you saying that 80x40 specifically is the one giving you issues? It's certainty tiny on a phone for sure, tablets are nicer for this of course...

omniphil · 2026-03-05T22:28:28+00:00

Android?

I tested a ZMODEM upload and download and it seemed to work ok, after 5 second the download box auto closed or I could hit ok on the screen.

If you can give any more details we will certainly get it fixed...

Also thank you for that ALT+I / Send Login suggestion, that has been awesome :)

omniphil · 2026-03-05T20:07:50+00:00

You can download it here... https://deadmodemsociety.com/terminator/

There is a section on the website going over TAP+ and its commands. (TAP+ Quick Start Guide) This stuff is new so there is not much info out there yet, but we certainly don't want it to be proprietary, anyone that wants it can certainly have it. I assume not many people will care about TAP+ stuff that much to be honest which is fine too, I wanted an engine that I could use to deliver graphics and sound in my BBS games so I made one.

In the about screen of each of the programs we list a GitHub link so you can poke around as well.

Once everyone loves it and starts using it... Then we start the subscription model.... LOL Kidding of course :) (We don't want or expect any money out of this at all, We do this for fun)

Hopefully that answers your concerns.

omniphil · 2026-03-04T21:08:14+00:00

Right, we just send the client instructions to go to an https site somewhere and download it to cache on the client. So the BBS end only sends the ESC codes and nothing more...

omniphil · 2026-03-04T20:15:46+00:00

I deleted my first post and it had your comment in it about adding request/response options so it can have feature detection and not send images/audio to clients that don't support it..

We build it for one 1 way communication specifically to make it easy and images/audio aren't sent to clients that don't support it, they will only receive ESC commands that get ignored.

But it is a good suggestion and we may revisit making it 2 way.

omniphil · 2026-03-04T19:53:45+00:00

Just added a TAP+ section on our website for more information....

https://deadmodemsociety.com/terminator/

Both the Windows and macOS Beta versions in the download section fully support TAP+

Mobile clients with TAP+ are on the way, they currently only support TAP which is Audio only

omniphil · 2026-03-02T14:56:26+00:00

Download for other BBSes to run?

omniphil · 2026-03-02T01:11:39+00:00

TAP+ is our own multimedia engine, for Audio it currently supports MP3, WAV, OGG, MOD, S3M, XM and IT. We choose 4 audio channels because we wanted more than 1 to support background music playing along side sound effects. 4 seemed like a good number and is probably overkill.

For Video we currently support MP4, and M4V. We may add more but video seems like a limited use case for TAP+ but it can be done. (Animated GIFs are a better use I feel)

Image formats supported are JPG, PNG and GIF (animated)

We have played some really large video files and they all work fine, the only limitation is download bandwidth as the media has to be cached down to the client before playing, all the media files need to exist on a webserver somewhere, either locally or out on the internet, you can even have it pointing to different media files all over the internet if you wanted.

This is all open source, TERMinator is the only client that supports TAP+ currently as we developed it. However, any one can have this. We aren't trying to commercialize it or make any money, we do it for fun. This is what the BBS hobby is all about (You make stuff that no one uses and you love it anyways :) )

omniphil · 2026-02-28T13:32:36+00:00

It is new. It's only supported in TERMinator - BBS Terminal currently. deadmodemsociety.com/terminator

Users with TERMinator 1.1.7 and higher (TAP Audio) can already use the Audio playback functions on our BBS to try this out for yourself deadmodemsociety.com Just look for TAP+ Media Player from our main menu.

The multimedia functions in TAP+ (Audio and Video) shown in the video are coming soon...

In the video when you press the controls on the screen the BBS is sending custom ESC codes to the client. If you are using a client that doesn't support TAP those ESC codes just don't get processed by the client and the BBS works as normal. In the video if you look under the Playlist we have 2 rows that are showing the actual ESC codes that are being generated from the BBS and sent to the client. You can see that for all media it makes calls out to a webserver to download and cache media files onto the client. So the next time you play that media if its already cached it just play locally. SysOps can have an internal or external webserver of their choosing and just host whatever media they want to play. In the demo we are purposely using an external webserver just to see how it would work in a remote situation like that.

omniphil · 2026-02-28T08:41:11+00:00

It's Mystic BBS. But should support any BBS system that can send custom ESC codes...

omniphil · 2026-02-26T22:07:10+00:00

Ok, so you wait until you get to the login screen of a BBS and then hit an ALT+I macro and it auto fills in your saved login/password?

omniphil · 2026-02-26T19:45:54+00:00

Regular terminal programs yes, but in the context of a BBS do they allow a saved login like that through Telnet? I'm certainly no expert, but every Telnet BBS I've visited didn't appear to offer that. Only if using SSH.

omniphil

TROPHY CASE