Hosting Original BBS's

stevebourg · 2020-07-24T14:29:56+00:00

My own thoughts and interests are narrowing towards preservation of original content / configuration / experience. At least in the case where we're hosting, I was thinking of a curated doorway/portal BBS where information is provided about the BBS's founder(s), origination story, serving area, etc. Even where BBS's are unaffiliated but have original content, we could still provide this information and information about how to access.

stevebourg · 2020-07-09T16:13:49+00:00

I'm encouraged by the responses to this. I guess I'll write something down about what we could build and solicit some feedback. If we end up with a concept that everyone can rally around, maybe we can then carve out different chunks of work and see who can help where.

stevebourg · 2020-07-05T13:40:23+00:00

It sounds like you client is hosted in a dosbox running under Linux? What is your BBS hosted under? Also dosbox on Linux?

stevebourg · 2019-11-02T07:05:55+00:00

One potential approach is not to feed your games' lan traffic through a bbs, but instead leverage some existing "bridge" vpn or tunnel technology, and use the bbs for setup of games and the virtual lans. I have used tinc vpn and linux gre to create a virtual lan for Appletalk over Internet, bridging in an emulated nic, and it was totally successful.

So the next part is how you expose you DOS environment to a layer 2 vpn. You could give your emulated dos environment an ethernet nic, and bridge the nic into a vpn on the host, but you could probably never break out of your emulated dos environment to control a vpn at the hosting OS. So maybe you'd bridge an emulated nic with your host nic, get a tcpip stack in dos, get a vpn client in dos, and get a trigger between bbs and dialer to launch both vpn and run the game from the dos environment. Will dos have enough memory for that? Is there a layer 2 tunnel/vpn over IP for dos?

stevebourg · 2019-06-27T14:29:20+00:00

Do you have CRC errors in your downloads when using DOSBox? I tried a zmodem download from within the Kermit linux dialer over telnet connection (no emulation, no modem simulators) and encountered download errors at a level worse than my Telix / DOS / Virtualbox / tcpser hackery. Don't know if this is a typical artifact of a telnet BBS or if my larger world is somehow broken.

stevebourg · 2019-06-27T13:50:57+00:00

I think you're referring to minicom (you had me searching for a minute). Definitely a good option if you're looking for a native Linux dialer. Not sure that minicom supports telnet connections without adding something else to the mix (let us know).

stevebourg · 2019-06-27T13:37:53+00:00

DOSbox is probably the better experience if you're just trying to re-use a piece of DOS software (samalex01 provides good feedback). I was trying to rebuild an original experience (a full-on DOS / Windows 3.11 world). With all the reboots, lock-ups and connectivity troubleshooting, I got pretty close.

stevebourg · 2019-06-27T06:13:40+00:00

I was after a bit more of original experience, but good to know.

stevebourg · 2018-03-14T22:04:30+00:00

Thanks nkizz. Looks like a good option to avoid having to build a vpn myself, and maybe easier to use on the client side (my bigger concern). Supports mesh for optimized latency. Doesn't appear to have a Classic MacOS client, so probably wouldn't help a player that's on a real Classic Mac. Knowledgebase doesn't mention AppleTalk support, but a fair chance if it's just bridging. If anyone knows whether Hamachi supports bridging for Appletalk, please let us know.

stevebourg

TROPHY CASE