Subj : Re: Retro Games
To   : Darklord
From : Commodore Clifford
Date : Mon Apr 17 2023 14:56:38

On 06 Apr 23  22:10:50 Darklord wrote...

DD> To which Darklord replies...
DD> 
DD> Honestly, if you're going to be using the adapted games from the
DD> source I mentioned, TOS v2.06 will be fine for most games. I can't
DD> absolutely say for all games though. It's nice to have the TOS
DD> decoder if you ever do need to "downshift" for compatibility reasons.
DD> 
DD> Hmm, running an Atari ST BBS under emulation? Well...in a nutshell,
DD> good luck. :)  To the best of my knowledge (and someone can jump in
DD> and correct me on this if it's not accurate), only 1 person has ever
DD> got the serial port stuff working under emulation for a BBS. It's
DD> also my grave understanding getting it working almost put that person
DD> in a looney-bin.
DD> 
DD> Now 8bit Atari's? That's a whole different story. There are a ton of
DD> emulated Atari 8bit BBS's.
DD> 
DD> Hope this helps.   

To which Commodore Clifford replies...

So, ESC... First let me apologize for not getting back to your email.  I
had intended to write something more detailed than I had the time for at
the moment and just got sidetracked (things went nuts around the holidays
and really are just now starting to calm down).

DarkLord is right... only one guy that I know of ever pulled it off, and
it was a pretty customized environment.  He made it very crystal clear
that he "did not want to be anyone's Yoda" in that regard.  It was still
pretty unstable and never quite worked right.

I've also done some dabbling with it (though to be honest, I'm not much
of an emulation person, but I thought I'd try it out just to see if it
could be done).  I never really like the results and kinda just left it
at that point.

The real problem with the ST emulators is that they're really designed
more for gaming.  Things like properly emulating a modem didn't seem to
be on the to-do list... so while you might be able to run a Term program
ok in emulation with a bit of work, the control signals that the BBS
relies on (for say, knowing when someone dropped carrier) don't seem to
work right.

Considering like I said that I personally have no use for it since I'm
not big into emulation and because we kinda have more BBS's than we can
support (the ST BBS's are even more the red-headed stepchildren as many
8-bitters don't consider us "real Atari") I probably won't be putting
much more effort into it anytime soon.

But as DarkLord says, good luck if you take the challenge on!

--- RATSoft/FIDO v09.14.95 [JetMail 1.01]
 * Origin: STar Fleet HQ - Running on real Atari ST Hardware! (21:3/171)

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