Subj : Re: What Legacy Technology Is Still Relevant?
To   : alt.bbs.doors
From : rhythmnp
Date : Sat Dec 25 2004 10:06 pm

>Are 
>either Desqview support or "snow checking" for ancient video cards 
>important to you?

I'd say that you can probably count the number of Desqview bbs's on one
hand...maybe two at most... (nonetheless, the number isn't zero)

The biggest Desqview usage is probably as a old-style MBBS/WG door server with
null modem cables.  That setup has largely been replaced by more modern rlogin
methods, but nonetheless a few sysops still use the Desqview+ G Host way for an
mbbs/wg door server, and a handful of other BBSs possibly use it as their main
OS if they're running on really old hardware.

It's probably safe to ignore it, but some doorkits (like OpenDoors) still have
built-in support for efficient time-slicing under it, so there's no reason to
manually remove that.

>Getting a little more controversial, is 16-bit DOS support important to 
>you?  If not, is *any* DOS support important to you?

If you make a door non-16bit DOS you'll lose maybe 25% of sysops.  A few of us
door authors have gone the 32bit-only route, but with mixed results... in any
case, if you do that and the door is good, you'll get pestered a lot about
porting it to DOS ;)

If the door is extensively multi-node interactive, DOS support can be a real
headache... but otherwise it's usually easy to include.

Another advantage of DOS doors is that they run under Linux (via DOSEMU), as
well as some legacy OS/2 boards.  

An increasing number of sysops are using Linux (and even a few use BSD Unix),
which makes sense since the text-based BBS culture meshes with the text-based
unix culture pretty well... So if you have any linux/unix experience, doing
ports there can be a great idea, or at least write your door to be extremely
portable (wrap ALL functions and data types related to OS-specific and
doorkit-specific behaviors) and then someone else can port it for you very
easily.

>or perhaps even a Java app 
>capable of running on Windows, Linux, Mac, etc.?

Unfortunately doors can't be written in Java.  There's no way to pass a
connection from a non-Java program to a Java program :(  ie, you can't pass a
connected Windows socket to a Java virtual machine.

>Now for the most controversial question: Is modem support important to you?  
>This is as opposed to telnet-only support. 

Well if you do a 16bit DOS version, do it using FOSSIL and then it can run over
a modem, as well as over a telnet FOSSIL driver.

If you choose not to make a 16bit DOS version: modem support in a Windows door
is pretty much useless.  One Win32 doorkit supports Windows comm routines, but
no BBS's actually support them compatably, so they're completely useless.  

In the end, what you support is up to you... it's difficult to get hard numbers
on how many sysops are using each OS and each BBS software.  But the more ports
you do, the more sysops will be able to run your door.

.