What (native) Linux BBS doors do you know of? reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- tekhammer · 2012-03-11 03:49 I've just got back into running a BBS after more than 15 years away from the scene.. This time around, I'm running [Mystic](http://www.mysticbbs.com/) under Linux. In the past I've run Telegard and Renegade, and this is a very familiar in a lot of ways. One problem I've struck, however, is the lack of door games. Because it's running on my main web server, I don't really want to install and run stuff under DOS emulators. Maybe in the future I'll move it to another box and that might be an option, but for now I want to stick to native Linux doors. The two I have now are **Ambroshia** and **Pimp Wars**. Ambroshia took a bit of convincing, but in the end it's working. The other down side is that it's quite an old version because the guy who was porting it didn't port the latest version. I've asked on the author's forum if I can get the source to try and compile it myself, but no response as yet. I just downloaded Darklands, but that doesn't seem to be wanting to play nicely at all. That and it needs to be reconfigured for each and every node. ugh. In the world of telnet, I can have infinite nodes. Do you run a Linux BBS? If so, what native doors do you have? And any other native Linux apps you might care to share, I'd probably be interested in hearing about. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ebookit · 2012-03-31 05:50 Most Linux BBS systems I know of use DOSEMU or DOSBOX to run BBS DOS Games. Somehow they redirect input and output to the BBS device. http://www.synchro.net/docs/linux-dosemu.html I think most BBS Games are in Turbo Pascal or Turbo C/Borland C, but yes they can be rewritten. Forget Tradewars 2002 there is no source code and it evolved to the TWGS Tradewars Game Server and Deuce is taking his time to port it to *Nix systems, been five years now and no *Nix port that I know of. But yes I would like to see more Linux native BBS Games. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2012-03-31 07:54 Thanks, if it was a dedicated box I may have gone the dosemu route, but because it's my webserver as well, I'm going to keep that off there. And because most door games once required registration, the source code isn't usually available. Seems most are effectively abandonware. I wouldn't mind getting the source for a few and trying to port them. If they're C, then most of that can port right over with curses. Not sure about pascal/freepascal, but I'm guessing pascal was used so much because it didn't need external libs for screen drawing. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ebookit · 2012-04-01 21:12 The best bet is to rewrite the games from scratch in C and hope to get as close to the original as possible. If more people did that and open sourced the games then we'd have more cross platform BBS games. I know C, but I don't know how to write a BBS game and hook to the BBS. If I did I could write a few simple games and get the ball rolling. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2012-04-01 21:34 Because they're all telnet based, then you can just wrote any C program and it will work via a bbs door. If you use [curses](http://tldp.org/HOWTO/NCURSES-Programming-HOWTO/), then you can lay the screen out for menus and such like. For bbs hooks, there are BBS doorkits that define the structure of door.sys files or whichever one you choose to use, but those files are just flat text files that have a very strict structure, so you'll know that line 3 is always the user handle, and line 5 is always the node, or whatever. I like the door32.sys format personally as it's just the right info in it, but depends on what your BBS can output. I started writing up a design doc a couple of weeks ago for game of my own, and I hope to get a bit further with it, but am so stretched for free time atm, that starting from scratch on my own probably won't happen for a while. Also, I'm more an assembly guy than a C guy. I can get by if I have to tho. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ebookit · 2012-04-02 01:41 Well I was thinking of writing a Food Fite type game. Players level up, have attributes like strength and dexterity that allow them to throw food better, etc. Fight NPCs and then have a player fight. Maybe buy better armor and weapons and the like. It should be easier to write that than a Tradewars or Legend of the Red Dragon or Barren Realms type game. Does curses do ANSI codes and the like? Most BBS games use ANSI and they are escape codes and stuff like that. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [deleted] · 2012-04-02 04:16 Yeah, do it. How ANSI codes get printed depends on your terminal emulation. In C, you can just printf with escape sequences. Use \033 to emulate the escape key and just use the rest of the ANSI code. It's not curses dependent. However, with curses you can change colours with some of its functions, and it deals with the appropriate ANSI codes in the background. Even a basic version of LORD would be easy to write. You don't need to add all the inter-BBS code, and you don't need to add all the fancy stuff like realm army building, and so on. Just make a basic dungeon hack. The logic wouldn't be too much different to doing an inter- player food fight. In a dungeon hack, players would just need to wander around some set dungeons, killing monsters, getting loot, xp, and money, and then they can level up which would bump their stats, and you could make them fight other players, with not too much extra code. Start simple, don't worry about graphics or screen layout, just print the text out, take the input, and spit out the results. Then once the background logic is sorted, or mostly in place, you can then fiddle around with the colours, screen layout and making it look nice.