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Games Entertainment

A Little Bit Of BBS Nostalgia 221

Posted by Hemos from the i-want-a-genesis-torpedo dept.
Ron Harwood writes: "I was getting nostalgic for the BBS door games of the late 80's and early 90's -- and decided that some of these could quite easily be brought onto the Web. So, with help from some of the players, I've created a Web version of the old BBS game TradeWars -- and released it as open source. You can try it out at BlackNova.net or download the source for your self at SourceForge. It's made with PHP and MySQL and it's getting reasonably bug free. :)"
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A Little Bit of BBS nostalgia More

A Little Bit of BBS nostalgia

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  • Does anyone know of a game called Dominions (I last saw it about 6 years ago) It ran on WWIV. Only seen it once. It's sorta like TW2002 and BRE (has combination of both building a planet and also sending out fleets to attack.)

    Thnx,
    Fuller
  • God, the first girl I dated I met on a BBS. Heck, I even asked her out online:-)

    I miss good ol' INDEX in 'Lanta.

    Every week we'd have a Bash... the INDEX office was filled with shit we ganked:-) Not just everything from a Waffle house but the employees, but a stool from Quzar, a newspaper stand, and countless road signs. We tried to get the Ben&Jerries cow, but security in that mall had caught onto us. Me and a bunch of others used to get online at night and all sneak out and drive around Atlanta packed into various small cars. Ever been 13 people inna pickup truck going 80mph down a neighbor hood road driven by the only person old enough to drink, and who was, of course, drunk?

    God, what I loss in highschool I made up on the INDEX BBS:-)

    So what happened to the cheesy ASCII graphics on Tradewars?:-) It just ain't the same!:-)

    --Cam

  • I played BRE every morning before leaving for class, then checked in again at night when I got home ... for years.

    ;-)

    We were a part of a very large network of gamers -- it was a lot of fun playing that way! That's why I've been playing games like Utopia [swirve.com] for a while now.

  • You can find BRE at www.johndaileysoftware.com/bre/ [johndaileysoftware.com] When i saw the web based tradewars my first thought was that there had to be a way to make BRE work on the web too. Maybe some people would be intrested in this... I guess I have a new hobby project just in time for the holidays. Get rid of nospam and underscores to email me.
  • I am currently running the largest TW server on the net, period. I have "old-timers" coming back to play all the time. Give it a whirl, you'll find my Dual 800 MHz box plenty fast. Almost like the good ol' modem days...

    EleqTrizi'T
    Sys Admin at twgs.tradewars.org
    The Home Sector [tradewars.org]
    Click here to login! [tradewars.org]
  • What is it with BBSers and Denny's in the wee hours of the night!?

    Quite simple, really... nothing else is open. ;)

    Joshua

    Terradot [terradot.org]

  • Sigh*... I hate to wax nostalgic, but I wish I had been born 15 years early. Due to my youth (born in 1977), I really missed so many great things -- or caught them only at the end of their lifespan.

    I hear ya. BBSes were great. I ran one myself and wrote a few cool door games for my own users. They got semi-popular around other boards, too, but never hugely took off. I always thought that if I had written them 5 years earlier they'd have been huge!

    I'm also thinking of open sourcing one of my door games, The Clans. So if you're interested, go here [ualberta.ca]. I'll have an update soon.

  • You want a little bit of the old nostalgia you can always call a real BBS. :) ASCII and ANSI Text!

    - Tradewars 2002
    - Legend of the Red Dragon

    FIDONet - AdventureNet - MicroNet - JustaXNet

    We've got it all baby! Up and running 7 years and still going strong!

    Come and play!

    telnet://clockworkorangebbs.org


    - Xabbu
  • I used to play 2 doors. Cartel and the other I can't rember the name (BBS ?). You ran a board against other users on the system.

    That would REALLY kick ass to play them again. I thought about converting them over a year ago, just never had time. Glad to see someone doing it!


    until (succeed) try { again(); }

  • heh... =)
    BEN: Fidonet...Fidonet? Now thats a nework name I haven't heard in a long
    time...a long time.
  • I definitively agree. TradeWars and BRE/SRE were good games...but I spent over a year playing Falcon's Eye every day. No other game has held my attention for that long.

    That being said, I don't think it's a good idea to go back to these things anymore. My original BBS home is still up (now with new and imporved INTERNET email!!!) but telnetting in just makes me think of how far we've come. It just doesn't feel the same anymore. All the old users are long gone, most of the message boards (including FidoNet) go unposted on for weeks or months (or, in some cases, years) at a time....It's kind of like going back to your hometown and seeing everything torn down...I'd rather just have my memories.

  • What is and what ever happened to this game that i played 1980-1982 where you would walk around looking for the orb in the bottom of the dungeon. Thanks

  • DOS door games under linux? (Score:3)

    by molo ( 94384 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @05:37AM (#573185) Journal
    Anyone had any luck getting DOS door games running under linux? DOSemu? Howabout DOSemuing a whole BBS? Does this work? How do you do telnet access? Some wierd-o FOSSIL driver or something? I'd be curious, and might even setup something if it is feasible.
  • I really don't remember Falcon's Eye... What do I know though :)
  • You can access The Village BBS (formerly based in Tampa, Florida, USA) via telnet://villagebbs.dhs.org

    It's got those ancient door games and message boards. I know *somebody* has to have some extra time at work (after reading slashdot of course). The speed is pretty good. Almost slow enough you think you're dialed in at 28.8k again!

    telnet://villagebbs.dhs.org

    The theme to the board is loosely based on The Prisoner tv show from 60s Britain.

    =steve
  • Joined FIDOnet, DementedNet
    Remember InfiNet and CyberCrime? Lots of useful info in there... Who was it that ran those? Nigel something from Florida?
    Damn... It's been a long time...
  • There's a copy of Tradewars 2002 v3.0 that was released rescently. It was set up to work as a telnet daemon.

    It was only $35 to register, and man o' man do we have fun
  • Yeah man. The Village is going to have Pimp Wars up... or already has it up. I need to email that sysop.

    =steve
  • Oh... and did I mention we are a LINUX BBS running our doors under DOSEMU?

    If your a sysop and need help with doors under Linux, go HERE:

    http://clockworkorangebbs.org/dosemu.html



    - Xabbu

  • Finally, an online 'cyberpunk' game that comes close to
    portraying computing as depicted in classic cyberpunk
    works like Neuromancer by William Gibson. In this game
    the player is a NetRunner, an arrogant and bold futur-
    istic hacker. Armed with his cyberdeck and an arsenal
    of offensive, defensive and analysis software he's
    ready to invade corporate systems in the grid and raid
    their credits, for fame and fortune! It's no cakewalk
    though! Waiting for the unwary are Intrusion Counter-
    measures (IC). Machine controlled defenses that can
    inflict damage to hardware and software, steal the
    players own credits and even cause... death.

  • Werd em up to old school folks.
  • Yo!

    I remember that man... Blue Thunder, run by JAFO, was cool. You remember King Lerxt, and the KLCC? I ran a board alternately known as "An Island In The Net" and then "Mars, The Red Planet."

    Shoot, those were the days. Any chance you remember a user named Lenin?

    sorry to everyone who wasn't in 818...


    OoO
  • Okay, totally un-pc, anyone remember Cripple Smash?

    Anyone remember a weird text file claiming to show you how to jump your 2400 to a 9600? Anyone ever get it to work?

    Anyone know what happened to Wayne Bell?


    OoO
  • Poor guy - he makes a cool new (old?) game and posts it to Slashdot...

    Now it's dead... Beware of the slashdot effect, more servers die to it than from faulty hardware.

    Seriously, it's nostalgic but I sucked at Tradewars and I'll probably suck at this one too...

    --
    All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...
  • I am glad to see that BBS games haven't died... they rock. I was thinking the other day that turn based BBS games (Tradewars, etc.) would make excellent PDA games. Each night when I sync up, it would upload my turns, and reset for the next morning.

    I wanted to code this myself, but I don't have any free time right now. Does anybody else think this may catch on?
  • You must have lived in Houston. I remember many afternoons in 1991-3 playing Tradewars, BRE and SRE on the local BBS's. Let's see... what did I go by... Gold Dragon or Q, that's it. Oh man, now I feel old.
  • With all this talk of BBS'ing, I'd like to take the chance to point out some of the other BBS's out there right now that have migrated to the web.

    A web-based version of the classic citadel BBS software has been created by one of the people responsible for Ed's Room, one of the largest BBS's in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area for many years. It's over at www.edsroom.com [edsroom.com].

    Another attempt to bring a web-based cit to the 'net is also being developed (independantly of the above) over at the Death Cookie, http://www.endeneu.com/funstuff/cookie/ [endeneu.com].

    And, of course, there's the obvious chance to plug my own efforts to bring a citadel-style board to the 'net. Mine, however, is telnetable (rather than a web-based pseudo citadel interface), and is fairly true to the original cit. The fun part is that it's written for BeOS [be.com], completely from scratch in C++. It's fairly similar to CitUX in that it supports multiple concurrent users, the main difference being that BeBS supports door games. ,)

    8088online, the test bed for BeBS, is available at http://www.bebs.net [bebs.net]. The site's undergoing a redesign right now, and the new website should be up by the 15th. Be aware that there's a java telnet client on the front page, so it may load slowly for you. There are links on the page for those who prefer to telnet.

    Now, if only I could get the source code for BRE, SRE, LORD, Trade Wars, and all the other classics...

  • mmm, bbs :)

    if you want some 31337 oldskool bbs action, check out lord [slashdot.org] thanks to the worlds most succesful sysadmin, nuke skyjumper :)
  • Every board I called reset games at midnight. I would always try to call first so I could kill players in LORD.
  • I was NOT going to do this, but you KIDS have driven me to it.:)
    Try going back to 1984. I spend the entire summer on the St. Louis boards back then, mostly the color64 and MTABBS systems (If you knew the mtabbs systems you may have known me as Mycroft or UatU)
    Later on me and a good friend ran a color64 board. he bought the good (4800 baud!!!!) modem and bbs software,and later the ram pack and 1851 drive (we had over a meg online!) I provided the line,physical,location, and coding needed to mod the system and run the add on prog's.
    The mid 80's where the hey-day for bbs's to me. The bbs outings for mtabbs boards was a lot of fun. I miss the old Junk Drawer and Rolla-link in Exile, among others. --sigh--.
    and we did this uphill in the snow both ways :)

    Mycroft <---my handle since 1984

    p.s. if you do remember the old mtabbs boards I'd like to here from you, esp if any are still up, just tack @postnet.com to my hanldle (no _VII crap) to email me.

  • ..and agree with ya. I started with a 300 baud modem in 1988 on a C64 and managed to see the rise of QLink -- back when it was cool -- it's morphing into AOL, and the rise and fall of BBS'. ran 2 BBS' too in the late 80's to mid 90's on the C64 then the PC.

    it was like a different world. always something new to discover, the "underground" feeling, the politics of "fight-o-net", err FIDOnet, etc...

  • Yes, a german site (in english) here: http://www.planetsserver.net/ [planetsserver.net]

    --

  • 8 node linux bbs with LORD, TW2002, BRE, Dopewars, and Darkness are all at inso.darktech.org. There are even msgs ;)
  • Now I have to ask, did they ever fix the bugs in TW2000? Can we still pull off the CargoTran Bug? (I loved that one) What about planet cloning? (dangerous but impressive). Me an my brother had a system going for exploiting the CT bug. (We found the nearest trading posts to the starbase, then I could clear them out, then my brother would log in and clear them out to reset the 'last bad guy to steal from us and get caught' field, then I would hit them again).

    BTW The gambling game in the bar cheats. If he/she/it/whatever gets a zero card, its discarded and he/she/it/whatever will draw another card. So their odds of a zero is 1/100 but yours are 1/10.

  • Heh, I should know, i run a project working on just such a thing, and unlike alot of sourceforge's, mine's beyond alpha and in use by more than 1 website.. I'd post the sourceforge link here, but that page isn't quite ready so i'll just post the link to my site using the software... The Machine [2y.net]
  • Can't just yet - that's a future enhancement - right now I'm working on core functionality.
  • I'm 23 too, but somehow I was old enough to download my first copy of Doom off a local BBS in NJ. Man, I still remember that day clearly :) My doors game of choice was always LORD...I hope that makes its way to open source sometime.


    --------
  • It sure is. The current version running needs alot of work..i've been meaning to update the sourceforge page, but college finals are coming up..heh something to do over xmas i suppose. i started on the next revision which greatly improves things and should make things like writing games for it pretty simple (right now, adding modules is almost a chore) and vastly improves the database routines.

    I think its real beauty is how easy it is to setup by people with not much experience. I know of a couple 15 year old kids who had their own site running in 1 night. Things like apache, mysql and so on dont HAVE to be complicated. It just seems that way because of the lack of documentation written with the general user in mind.

  • I think that the time for our old-school BBS's are long gone. What someone (with more time than me, hopefully) should try and do is set up a modern interpretation of them. ie., to try to have a similar feel and ambience on a website.

    But would we put up with it today? I don't know. I seem to be less patient these days...perhaps because I have less time now than I did when I was 15 years old.

    I think the biggest draw of BBS's was the sense of community. Of seeing those recognizable handles...even if you never met in the real world, you would always respond to each other's posts or request a chat. Not to mention those great, obscure text files! And the downloads (my favorite BBS had a 6-CD changer...and SL-Files (or something like that...).

    I think that building an online modern BBS would be the ultimate example of a WWW community. A telnettable ANSI art BBS is just a reminder of how far we've come....

  • Where's BRE ? (Score:3)

    by DraQ ( 161513 ) <hendry AT iki DOT fi> on Friday December 08, 2000 @02:23AM (#573212) Homepage

    Damn, i loved that door game BRE. Barren Realms Elite, anyone else used to play it ?

    There is planetarion [planetarion.com] nowadays, but it just didn't seem to "cut it" like BRE used to.

    and also Usurpers, Vgaplanets... *sniff* major bbs...

  • Hey Ron, how, if possible, do you see other players currently logged on? I've been logged on for a while now without a timeout, so my guess is that being logged on means you have a cookie and the server doesn't keep track.

    Which leads to another question: is there a means for players to communicate in real time while playing?
  • I just setup a BlackNova server here:
    http://iaccess.cx/blacknova/ [iaccess.cx]

    Now all we need is some color!
  • I came across my "The Pit" disks the other day. Ah the good ol days. Man that was a good game.
  • Back in the early to mid 90's, I had a pretty popular website in the Portland (Oregon) area which had some of the old standards such as LORD, TW2K, Arena, PIT and a lot of others. Too bad the internet killed it.

    Still, it is nice to see some of these games having clones ported to the web. Even if people can't completely regain the atmosphere of a BBS -- they can enjoy the atmosphere of the games that used to occupy so much time (remember when you tried to fit an entire game of TW2K or LORD before your account ran out of alotted time for the day?).

    *Sigh*... I hate to wax nostalgic, but I wish I had been born 15 years early. Due to my youth (born in 1977), I really missed so many great things -- or caught them only at the end of their lifespan.
    ---
    seumas.com

  • Heh... I did write my latest online game [starshiptraders.com] in C, but my new (non-game) websites are in PHP. It's remarkably appropriate and flexible for writing web applications, especially DB-driven ones.
  • Aaah - I remember Major BBSes. One of these was the first one I was on back in the day in Cincinnati. It had six lines, and one was usually used up by me... Of course, my parents didn't like the strange noises coming from the phone when they tried to call people... and then they made me go and drop carrier... +++ ATH0
  • Ahh, the good old days. I used to run a bbs, 95-96 i believe, and it was a blast. I ran TW2002, LORD, and Pimp Wars. Oh man. There were 2 'groups' of bbs's in our town. The good ones (which were all run by high school and college students, mine included) and the shitty ones (the ones run by people 30+). Anywho, the people that hung out on the 4 really popular boards used to have bbs night, every tuesday night we would go to dinner and then go bowling. It was a blast. I really miss those days.
  • AFAIK the other one was Legend of the Red Dragon (LORD) - cool game, really fun to play (and get waxed every day by some BBS door Troll)... :)

    --
    All browsers' default homepage should read: Don't Panic...

  • bbs.ufies.org (Score:3)

    by Alien54 ( 180860 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @03:06AM (#573221) Journal
    Of course, there is an old style bbs you can telnet to associated with the UserFriendly [usefriendly.org] fan base.

    You can telnet directly to bbs.ufies.org - there is a web page at http://bbs.ufies.org/ with a couple of useful links like who is oneline now, etc. They have been up for about a year and a half, and are running the game doors on dosemu on a linux box.

    Of course, I expect them to get /dotted by all the fresh attention.

  • my friends and i ran through the same nostalgia recently and set up a little telnet BBS just to play some old skool door games. It's located at bbs.sexsexworld.com [sexsexworld.com], for anyone wanting to get their game on.

  • THe good old days of '95-'96? Try '89-'90 when there were still Apple // BBSes that ran off of a really slow clone of Citadel 86. Ahh those were the days.
  • it was a long time ago, and from memory. I could have sworn the decompiler was made by 'the chicken' ???

    Best PPL coder award goes to: Black Cat from (DoD, IIRC) i could be wrong on the group tho...
  • Man... I remember I was a co-sysop for a BBS in Toronto...

    I had access to the dos command prompt, so I decided to change some of the ansi graphics of the star ships...

    this whole PHP3, and SQL stuff, combined with a slow host/provider, doesn't stir up any good emotions when you try to blow up that starship that tried to blow you up last week.

    Or have the ability to takeover a planet (that I noticed) that was artificially created by some other guy with a genesis missile... go figure...

    It would be nice to have a more graphical interface (even it it was just coloured text)... instead of this standard colour default browser colour scheme.

  • Can't belive I missed this topic.. damn.
    So I'm a little late, maybe someone will notice this.

    I had so much nogalstia I decided to ressurect, in a sense, an old BBS I used to go on. It's running Worldgroup (i.e. MBBS), which is hard to get ahold of nowadays. You can telnet to it, or go via web, at tgc2.net. Sadly, a lot of the software is still hundreds of dollars to license, and I don't have that kind of money - hell, right now it's only running off my DSL. But it's still neat, I got a lot of the original people on and we've got a pretty quirky community. Anyone interested is welcome.

    telnet://tgc2.net
    http://tgc2.net
  • Lenin? ya i think i do. my handle was Jack Cane.

    and yes, i remember JAFO, KLCC (and hacking it) and King Prick.

    -Jon
  • I've created http://lord.nuklear.org, a web based LORD game that runs under dosemu/Linux. I recommend you all check it out.

    Also, I am coordinating an open-source rewrite of LORD. It is currently in active planning stages. We will be using Perl and MySQL, and it will be fully telnettable and designed for the Net.

    If anyone's interested in participating in new features to the Nuklear LORD system, or coding the New Free LORD game, drop me an email.

    -Nuke Skyjumper
    nuklear@zxmail.com-NOSPAM
    (remove -NOSPAM to email me, obviously.)
  • Hey, damn I had almost forgotten about OO][ I remember running it in a little program I had written that detected when I went to fight and automatically hit space at the right time for me. I also remember that there was a lag between when you hit space and it registered it which varied depending on which level you were fighting on. Of course my little program compensated for that and I had a 100% hit rate which meant I could wander down pretty deep before I had to worry about getting killed with a new character. A decent character could wander all the way to the bottom without to much of a problem.

  • If you played Trade Wars, chances are you also played Global Wars, the BBS Door version of the boardgame 'Risk'(TM).

    BlueDragon has re-created Global Wars on Prowler-Pro [prowler-pro.com]: he calls his version World at War [prowler-pro.com], and he has made it look and feel very much like the original Global Wars. I've been playing for months now, it's just as addictive as the original. Be sure to read through the help info on the login page to discover what all the variants are.

    -Leperflesh

    Note: Risk(TM) is a trademark of Parker Brothers or somebody; World at War is a reverse-engeneered, HTML based game that is based on Global Wars, and not Risk(TM). I am not a lawyer.

  • BRE was the best BBS door game of all time!!!! I have searched long for a Web version of this game. The best was the Interplanetary versions of the game (when you can compete with other BBSes). What was your favorite type of land? gotta love industrial & deserts with some river thrown in.... if there ever is a BRE web door, count me in! -- Ikonoklast --
  • I miss those times, I found a whole slew of BBSes modified to run on the net, for instance, a telegard board:

    bbs.darktech.org

    There also a list of net and non-net bbses still running at :

    www.synchro.net
  • I think I remember seeing something about that also -- but I never saw it actually up and working. My related game, Starshiptraders [starshiptraders.com] has been up on the web -- as well as telnet -- for over four years. Early versions (until June of 99) were called Tsarwars, however.
  • Fie upon Windows BBS's -- back in the day (1990-92), I ran Maximus and BinkleyTerm (the Fidonet mailer) in a DOS session under Desqview so I could get work done in another window. I remember receiving a message (in Texas) from a Fido node in Australia; I printed out that message and saved it because it was so amazing that it took *only* twelve hours to reach me. I also recall the day somebody connected to my board with a 300 bps modem (ridiculous even in those days).

    Oddly enough, I still have the 386 I used to run the board, because it's so obsolete now that even charities won't take it. I've still got the same modem (a USR Courier) as well, except that it's since been repeatedly flashed from USR's proprietary 16.8kbps protocol all the way up to v90. It now sits in my closet as a backup in case my DSL ever goes out.

    Sigh -- *major* nostalgia attack. Oh Bell's Theorem BBS, we hardly knew ye...
  • Aaah! Citadel, how I love thee! WWIV- lame. Renegade and Cheeze- chock full of warez kiddies. Wildcat- even lamer. The only worth while boards were the Citadel systems, the only ones, IMO, which fostered conversation, rather than just files. The memories...

    Then there was The HUB- with such door game gems as PimpWars... Forget TradeWars and L.O.R.D.- all any board really needed was PimpWars.

    Aaron
    (rev. bud green/rev. orgy-na/aaron the anarchist/rev. aaron)
  • SRE and BRE. Solar Realms Elite and Baron Realms Elite. SRE = future, BRE = medieval.

    I was into both of them, I would always play but if you skipped more than 1 day you were screwed...

    I play a lot of Pimpwar now (http://www.pimpwar.com). A lot of fun, and follows the same sort of ideas...
  • Interestingly enough, I just realised that Mehul Patel, the author of BRE is also the author of Earth and Utopia, the games now hosted at swirve.com.

  • Blacknova Traders (Score:3)

    by drenehtsral ( 29789 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @06:10AM (#573256) Homepage
    I've played this blacknova traders, and it was a lot of fun. I ended up not having a chance to get on for a week due to hectic stuff and i got blown up =:-) Shit happens, it is fun, so give it a shot...
  • I *loved* that game, used to play on a FIDONet BBS here in Anchorage called the Mailman, I loved playing there because those of us playing locally could launch attacks against other BRE boards, we had a great rivarly with another board in Seattle, it was the coolest thing.

    Me and a couple of the other powerful players on our board ended up forming a strong aliance and began charging others a "protection" fee which we mostly used to fund attacks against Seattle. I'd love to play that game again.
  • You know, if he was going to do this, he should have done it as a server you could telnet into. I've always hated web games, because while you knew someone had to try it some time, they've always been dreadfully slow and awkward. Among other things, when you click on a link and go to a new "screen" you can no longer see what was on the previous one--no scrolling. But the main thing is it's incredibly slow.

    I've always wanted an open source TradeWars 2002 clone, written in C and for UNIX and specifically playable by telnet. Now that would be awesome.

  • I think so - but Stars! has become much more popular.
  • You can pull a lot of neat tricks with dosemu. My favorite being to trick DOS into thinking a telnet port is actually a modem, then you can just run your dos BBS software and doorgames over telnet without any modification. As far as the DOS fossil driver's concerned, it's talking to an analog modem that handshakes in a millisecond. ;)

    So yes, you can have your maximus/renegade/telegard/wwiv/majorbbs/spitfire/e tc BBS running under dosemu and taking calls from both modem(s) and telnet.

    Check the dosemu documentation or the howtos over at linuxdoc.org [linuxdoc.org].
    ---
    Where can the word be found, where can the word resound? Not here, there is not enough silence.
  • Fidonet is still alive. Check out fidonet.org [wwwfidinet.org]

    now more often seen in places like russia, etc. but still kicking with a few diehard hobbyists.

    Also an underground way (if slow) to do email, etc.

  • Re:Where's BRE ? (Score:3)

    by Toth ( 36602 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @03:40AM (#573276)
    The author of BRE is currently operating a fairly popular site at

    www.swirve.com

    The most BRE-like game there is:

    games.swirve.com/utopia/

    It has about 50,000 players in kingdoms of 25 each. It is similar in flavour to BRE with a kingdom forum, thieves (spies), etc.

    His first attempt to bring BRE to the web is at:

    games.swirve.com/earth/

    The Earth2025 game evolved in to something different than BREE with more emphasis on infividual play in some games and alliances in others but it is still quite popular.

  • There have been periodic resets as the game has developed - remember that Blacknova is in beta still...

  • I miss the door games just a little (good old LORD - that was such a ball!).

    I really miss the storyboards. I used to spend hours a day writing and keeping up with the stories. I do quite a bit of gaming these days, but nothing is quite like those old storyboards.

    Some friends tried to ressurect some of the old boards using (ack!) the Geocities guestbook function, which worked for a while, but died of real life obigations. (I have the cast list and archive of one at http://www.eclipse.net/~srudy/enigma/index.html [eclipse.net].)

    Now it seems the web community is too big to run one of these without it going random too fast.

    Those were the days...

  • Over here in the 412 scene, our good friend Nuke has set up a LORD game (telnet to lord.nuklear.org:31337). If you visit http://lord.nuklear.org [nuklear.org], you'll find a really well done LORD portal that displays a public list of stats as well as history, tech notes, and a Java gateway.

    Enjoy!

  • Nostalgia. Moderate? No, Post.

    I was an active participant of the 201 area code (northern NJ) BBS scene from about 1985-1992. I used to run my own system 'Dronefone' on an Apple //e (20MB Sider, 5MHz Rocket Chip) on homegrown software. I was part of the 'BBS Triumverate' which included an IBM site called 'Middle Earth' (2AM BBS software) and a C128 run by a man by the handle of IronKnight. We were very popular sites, and we had doors.

    Some of the doors that were popular at the time was TradeWars (of course), DopeWars and the Infocom adventures. I wrote a few, the most obscure being a game called 'The Maze' which was written in DragonSoft BBS's scripting language 'Autoscript' for a board run by 'Citizen Stile' (a big Peter Gabriel / Genesis fan).

    Those were the days. Back when making a cup of coffee, kicking back and reading some posts on your (or other) boards was quite relaxing and entertaining (regardless of the fact that you were cruising along at 300bps).

    I think there is still one site left from those days, a small C64 BBS called North*Link at (973) 376-0816. I think it's only 300/1200 and works best with C64 graphic-enabled programs. They still have a few doors left.

    Anyway...

    --

  • I remember those days...it was a lot more fun than the internet in my opinion. My favorite was one in North Carolina called Infinity Cyberplex. They had some games as well as multiple lines, good message boards, and if you met someone on there, unless they were telnetting in, you could go hang out with them. Also, there were a limited amount of users, so you had to learn to interact with those people rather than completely piss them off and try to change identities or else someone would realize that you switched accounts.

    I would say that the main difference is that it was more personal. I met people on there that had common interests with me, ended up working with one guy, made a few other friends, and even one enemy who turned out to be a wimp.

    BBSing was my first introduction to an "online community" and it was much more of a community than slashdot or most of the internet based ones that you find now. I know there were certain disadvantages to BBSing, and that most of them were mediocre ones that people set up in their houses to run at night just to be "31337" but there were a few really good ones out there.

    You say to leave it in the past, but without knowing the past we can't build a more interesting future. There is a lot to be learned from those days. Imagine connecting to the internet with a 2400 baud modem. Well, with most BBS's right up until the time of the internet, that was perfectly fine as long as you didn't intend to do file transfers. Also, you had to be more creative with setting up your site, as you mostly only had ASCII graphics. Later on, more complex things came along like RIP graphics, or even some had a windows GUI you could use, but for the most part the people running a BBS had to do more work, and had more quality BBS's than all these losers with their geocities websites. So, I guess what I am saying is that yes, we can not bring back the days of the BBS, and it would be a step backwards from a global network. However, there are things about those days that were superior to what the internet has today, and we should try to learn how to improve the internet based on where we were in the past and where we are today.

  • fidonet! (Score:2)

    by r ( 13067 )
    fidonet! now there's a network i haven't heard mentioned in a while. my first net access was through fidonet (bbss with internet connections were really expensive!), and i got screamed at a lot by the sysop for chaining together bbs message board -> bbs/fidonet email gateway -> fidonet/internet email gateway -> email/ftp gateway -> ftp to download files from the net by email. :)

    and now i have dsl and haven't logged on to a bbs for ages, even though a friend of mine is still sysoping one. :(

    not that i miss slow connections and inane boards, but the bbss were amazing in that they supported actual communitites. i mean, people on bbss lived in the same geographical area, bumped into each other on the boards a lot, and many reallife friendships started on the boards. there's nothing quite like that anymore on the geographically-blind internet.

    i can't resist comparing this to the extinction of eccentric private bookstores due to chains like borders or barnes and noble. sure, now the selection is vast and information is cheap - but the interaction with interesting people is lost.

    but now i'm sounding like a nostalgic 1995-era wired journalist pining after a vague dream of 'virtual communities'. i better stop. :)
  • I never could figure out why anyone would ever want to stop using a shell account and Lynx and start using some RAM hogging *graphical* web browser.

    I ran a BBS as well back in the day... Speaking of graphical memory-hogging stuff, remember Robo-board with the Windoze term software and simplistic graphics support?
    Yeah... Them were the days...
  • Hmm, I got into the BBS scene rather late (around 1996), but I played Falcon's Eye quite a bit. It was the sequel to BRE (put out by the same people: Solar Realms, whose home BBS was local to me =) It contains quite a few gameplay improvements over BRE but is the same basic game. I wouldn't mind playing that again...
  • Thanks for doing this, Ron. I've been hoping that someone would port the best of the door games to a web format. (I'm still holding my breath for a good port of Solar Realms Elite, or for the time to do it myself...)

    PHP's a fine choice for this; I'd probably use it myself. The only alternative that readily springs to mind would be to write a daemon in C to interface with Imatix [imatix.com]'s great open source Xitami web server, which is especially friendly for this sort of hackery.

    Anyway, I look forward to playing Tradewars again. Good job!

    --

  • I know I'm just asking to get slashdotted for this probably, but I have a BBS up.

    telnet: www.unimatrix01.org [unimatrix01.org]

    I have quite a few BBS Door's up, including Tradewars, and it's free. It hasn't gotten much activity lately and I was thinking of taking it down...

    I also found a huge collection of my old floppies from my BBS days and started putting them up here [unimatrix01.org] There are a bunch of old dos programs, some BBS doors/programs and a bunch of other crap.

    I also would like someone to help me go through it all and help me catalog it.

    Welp, have fun all.
  • The sad part was, I had better luck meeting chicks off of BBSes than off of the internet.

    How pathetic am I?
  • Hmmm, this has caught my interest. I used to run Renegade BBS Software back in the day. It was not open source, but it was free. Now I aw thinking of setting up a whole telnet-able bbs. I could not seem to find any working Renegade links. Damn.

    So does anyone know of any GPL full bbs software for linux that has telnet-able access? I am really looking for something like Renegade or Telegard. I saw Mistic BBS but I do not think it is GPL. Any ideas?

  • Oh man... (Score:4)

    by pb ( 1020 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @04:11AM (#573348)
    I loved BBSes. I loved them even when I had a 14.4 modem, 'cause I'd still connect at 2400 just to chat to the same people all the time...

    Maybe slashdot was like this. In the beginning. A little. But I'm sure I could configure a machine to be much more like a BBS, on the web, or not. I think that having a small community of quirky people is a requirement as well...

    But if it had to be a web page, then I suppose you'd have to have topics and comment threads (we have those, but the topics are somewhat regulated). You'd also have to "Login" and "Logout", and optionally be able to post silly comments that show up at Login. You'd have a file area, with lots of useful stuff (freshmeat.net?) random text files ("How to get HBO for free" => textfiles.com?) and funny stuff. Of course we always had polls...

    So yes, the Internet has elements of the BBS community, and places like slashdot have it more than most, but it still isn't the same, and every BBS feels different, too, with a very unique, ingrown sense of community.

    I remember Another World felt very friendly and homey, and Cedar Republic felt more serious, (but it had TWO lines! You could chat with a friend!) and Psychotronic was basically a nest of Trolls... :)

    In retrospect, I wouldn't give that up for anything. Maybe not even for the computer I have now instead of my 386 back then...
    ---
    pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate [ncsu.edu].
  • Merchant Empires is one of the best 'adaptations' of TradeWars that moved to a new medium. It is also opensource, with a home page of http://merchempires.sourceforge.net/

    It also uses simular technologies as the storys subject, but is much better at taking advantage of graphics, etc..
  • I think BBS systems allowed for much more social interaction between users that the internet does. BBSes were limiting in that it was usually people within local calling distance. But that gave you a chance to have user group meetings and have people over to show them how everything worked. There was actual social interaction going on.

    While the web and browsers are technically superior to a ANSI art on a terminal program, they just can't match the functionality of a BBS. Just about anywhere you were, you could just post a message and usually get a response. Everything was laid out in a fairly simple format. One keystroke to access different sections. Don't know what commands to use in a section, press the ? key.

    For those of you complaining about having to learn an esoteric command structure: What about linux, or DOS, or almost anything else that has any functionality?

    While I don't want to give up internet access and my browser for certain things such as reading Dilbert everyday, I would rather play a strategy game like TW in character mode that some commercialized java applet game.

    BTW, does anybody have any examples of multi-player games that existed before door games? Ones that didn't require two people physically sitting next to each other.

  • Gah! (Score:2)

    by denshi ( 173594 )
    Bug free except that they deleted all the accounts!!

    Oh the humanity!! I had a dozen planets, a few billion (trillion? anyway, a bunch of zeros) socked away; a missile array so big the Vorlons would notice me again -- GONE!

    boohoohoo

    I tell you, it's the perfect analogy to door games - you play for a while, beat all your roommates, and then the BBS Op moves or his mom shuts him down or something. Total system failure -- now there's nostalgia.

  • Man, I remember my BBS, outland, it had fidonet echomail, pimpwars and some shareware on my ol' 8088, 640K, 2400Baud modem, and a 60Mb MFM HD. Thats what got me interested in code to begin with. Some of the fidonet scripts where written in Pascal, so I bought a book and started learning.

    What a long strange trip it's been - The dead.

  • At first it was playing a handfull of games my dad got for our C64, he was into programming at the time, and his Vic20 just wasen't pulling it anymore.

    Then on the news one day i saw "Dragons Lair" and new i had too have it. It ran on an Amiga, so after bugging my dad for about 2 months strait (can i get it? can i get it? can i get it?) i got my first computer, an Amiga 500. I actually got really info 3d rendering using Sliver, then Imagine 3d (1.0). but for some reason right after i got an Amiga 3000 (oh those we're the shit). i lost interest.

    then i got a modem. a USR external 14.4 (about $260 at the time)

    I got a local recycler and called up a few BBS's listed. Got onto a BBS called .. ah crap i forget. but it ran WWIV ported to the Mac (anyone remember the name of that?). got so much into it i decieded to make my oun BBS. I checked out BBS software for the Amiga, but all they had we're funky little scripted ones. So i used my familys x86 (that my dad and I built) to run WWIV.

    I called the board Altered States (as i was into drug info at the time), to get files for the board i spent about a strait week calling every other BBS in cali that might have drug-info files. sure a lot of them we're complete crap - strait out of the Anarchists Cookbook. but it filled up the drug sections. at the end i have something like 700 files. all comenented. .. if only i had the patience now.

    I also ran a program that would crawl through all the .zip files and add my little Altered States add to the the .zip's. made ANSI (and ASCII) adds for the board and posted them at other boards. and after a few months of no calls, I started getting popular.

    So popular i got a new machine, a used 386 and a 200mg harddrive (the x86 had a 40mg HD). got around 50 calls a day for a while, one of the most popular boards in 818. I had regulars and a very active message board... i miss that. We had user meets, over 50 people showed up. Sometime they would have user meets I wouldn't even plan. it just became a regular thing, people made friends on the board. we all lived in LA/818. I got my first email address via ThunderNet (a WWIV based network), and i ran PimpWars on the door games.

    about 6 months later i was stoned one night and did a del * on the wwiv directory...

    woops.. dude..

    so after a few weeks of nothing, and the same night as braking up with my girlfriend i made a new board called "The Plastic Board". while it never did as well as Altered States. it had it's following. until about 96, when it became to apparent that there was really no need for it, WWIVNet, ThunderNet, and Blue Thunder. all very popular at the time, we're all dieing, the Internet (information suport highway - at the time) had took over.

    long gone, but Slashdot kind of reminds me of that. thats why i come here, to read the messages.. at the new user screen for Altered States i had a message.. "We don't supply the sugar, that comes from you". meaning the board was really what people made of it, and they could add to it as they wish. I like that idea.

    -Jon
  • ROTFL. So I'm not the only one who got yelled at for trying that trick? :-P

    I actually wrote a quick program to basically serve as a Door App, present some of the FTP resources like wuarchives (Remember, the ORIGINAL cdrom.com :-) ), request a file, and the door would throw the email request out to the Fidonet gateway to the FTP to email gateway at Digitial. When the mails where recieved, the mail tosser would throw them into a designated directory, and the door would pick them up, reassemble them, and throw them into Renegade as a file attachment in a private message to the requestor.. :-)
  • Yeah, I played on the stardock until it went away a few years ago. This thing, with its web interface, might be worth investigation.

    This server is pretty slow right now -- but it's slashdotted -- it may be much better later. It would be interesting to see how many users are logged on right now with the thing still responding. This may be a quality implementation.

    Starshiptraders is written in C but requires a dedicated server and lots of memory to achieve good response. I've always been afraid to submit it to slashdot. ;)
  • Here is a link that works: www.fidonet.org [fidonet.org]

    I remember being a leafnode to a fidonet BBS. Ah, they had flame wars in those days! Scary that they're still around.

  • Re:Nostalgia *sniff* (Score:3)

    by Kingfox ( 149377 ) on Friday December 08, 2000 @07:09AM (#573377) Homepage Journal
    Worldgroup Manager was an interesting step indeed, but annoying to code for.

    I started BBS'ing around 1990 or 1991 in the central Jersey area (201/908 - now 732 area code). Ran a BBS off my 8088, 2400 baud modem, 20 meg hard drive. The small hard drive space kept my BBS from turning into a warez BBS, but I still tried to do as much as possible with what I had. Joined FIDOnet, DementedNet, and was co-founder of an ANSI art group, SNaP! The people I BBS'd with were local people, and I often met them in real life.

    By the mid 90's, most of my friends were switching over to the commercial multi-line chat MBBS's. Cheers, The Imperial Fortress, Excalibur, etc. While I waxed nostalgic about the old one-line BBS's sitting in a chat room with thirty people on TIF, I didn't know how short that form of community's lifespan would be. After 96, I worked for Cheersoft, a company that wrote utilities and doors for MBBS/Worldgroup. At that point the internet was taking over most of the local BBS scene. The one-liners were dying, and the 50-100 liners were becoming mom and pop ISP's. It was sad, in a way, working in part of a scene that was dying. But the BBS scene was one of the greatest things I was involved with, and I had tons of fun. One of my best friends from high school married a girl that we met on a BBS years ago. Some of my good friends to this day are people I met back in the mid 90's on BBSes.

    The thing I miss the most about it all is the geographical closeness, as another poster mentioned. One night sitting in the Worldgroup teleconference, some girl expressed interest in pizza. Within an hour, a dozen of us had driven all over Jersey to make it to a pizza place. I can't do that with people as easily over the internet. Local BBS's would do photoshoots with the sysop's girlfriend or other random female users, then post up the bikini pix on other sites to advertise their BBS. You would call these BBS's, knowing you could score with them. :-) Can't even fool yourself into believing that over the internet.

    A group of former BBS'ers in central jersey have formed a very Linux-friendly telnetable BBS at darkplanet.org [darkplanet.org]. If you were part of the community back in the day in that area, you might just run into a few dozen old faces.
  • DXgaming [dxgaming.com] has a copy running which isn't so polluted with problems and rampant cheating.

  • The site is just damned slow right now... but it's still kicking out pages...
  • If you were making a web-based game - what language would you have used?

    I could have used perl, or python or even C if I had wanted... but I wanted to learn PHP...

    I don't regret that choice.
  • In some places it's Perkins instead of Denny's.

  • I ran RoboBoard and Robo/FX at one point in my BBSes career (The Cauldron, out of Eastern Ontario, and eventually Saltspring Island BC) and loved it. The company that produced it [mediahouse.com] is still around - producing excellent website and network monitoring tools. I use their Livestats on one of my websites.

    Roboboard was truly cutting edge for its time, offering full GUI and graphical interfaces at a time when most BBSes were stuck in ANSI - although it gave that option too. It was also a wonderful package to configure. Nicely designed overall.

  • wow.. I remember the days.. just last week I wasted a few hours playing NetRunner [cotbbs.org].. Man that was a cool game.. There are utils for windoze which give you a fossil driver connected to the telnet port which you can use to run the old bbs programs unchanged. They don't work too well however.

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