Door games and custom character sets reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- deepthaw · 2017-06-21 16:11 I'm surprised I never this become more of a "thing" among BBS doors. Maybe there was a technical reason why. Anyways, since for speed of transmission and hardware support most Door games were limited to Extended Ascii (Codepage 437), I'm kind of surprised that a method didn't arise for users to download a custom character set to load in DOS so games could alter the character set to fit their game. It'd be very similar to how old C64 and Apple II games would run in character mode, but modified the built-in characters to function as a graphical tileset. I could have even seen some type of ANSI escape sequence to request that a specific codepage/character set be used automatically so users would just have to make sure it was downloaded once and then it'd switch to it on demand. Did this happen and I just wasn't aware of it? Was there a technical hurdle? Was it just more trouble than it was worth? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- kevinlamonte · 2017-06-21 16:45 It did happen in other areas, but not so much on BBSes: * VT220 and above have a way to specify character sets via escape sequences. These are essentially all subsets of ISO 8859-X for the European languages. * VT300 series had sixel graphics, which could generate custom characters on-the-fly. * SyncTERM has escape sequences that let you specify a different font, for use in BBS systems. * xterm has escape sequences that let you specify a different font, mostly for use in restricted or lab settings. (These used to be cool in the early days of X11, but are now seen as a security risk and usually disabled by default.) * A lot of systems passed ANSI directly to ANSI.SYS, which had sequences for changing the screen rows x cols, which could also resemble a font change. * Only VGA monitors could easily switch fonts. By the time VGA was really commonplace along with 9600+ modems, RIPscript and NAPLPS (Prodigy) were right around the corner and they had direct GUI elements. Within 5 years later ppp and Netscape became available, and that was that. These days, modern systems would do custom character sets by way of UTF-8 support and a good TrueType font. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ellisgl · 2017-06-21 20:40 > ound the corner and they had direct GUI elements. Within 5 years later ppp and Netscape became available, and that was that. Don't forget that RoboBoard/RoboBoard FX came out too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBOARD/FX ---------------------------------------------------------------------- WikiTextBot · 2017-06-21 20:40 **RoboBOARD/FX** RoboBOARD/FX was a computer software first introduced by Hamilton TeleGraphics Inc, written by the owner Seth Hamilton in 1992. At a time where BBS Software (such as RemoteAccess) were merely using ANSI art interfaces RoboBOARD started a revolution. It was the first fully graphical BBS system with iconic navigation, punchy bitmaps, and vector fonts, all at a time when ultra-fast high-speed modems were barely clocking 2400 bit/s. RoboBOARD/FX provided a familiar looking graphical user interface for DOS, complete with dragging windows, clicking buttons, scrollbars, pop up dialogue boxes and templates. *** ^[ [^PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=kittens_from_space) ^| [^Exclude ^me](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiTextBot&me ssage=Excludeme&subject=Excludeme) ^| [^Exclude ^from ^subreddit](https://np.reddit.com/r/bbs/about/banned) ^| [^FAQ ^/ ^Information](https://np.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/index) ^| [^Source](https://github.com/kittenswolf/WikiTextBot/) ^] ^Downvote ^to ^remove ^| ^v0.22 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- temotodochi · 2017-06-22 09:07 Sixel is still supported by some terminal emulators and iterm understands raw base64 so I can basically "cat" any image with a base64 conversion script directly in the terminal. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- RazorKitten · 2017-06-26 01:44 5 Years before that was SkyPIX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skypix ---------------------------------------------------------------------- WikiTextBot · 2017-06-26 01:44 **Skypix** Skypix is the name of a markup language used to encode graphic content such as changeable fonts, mouse-controlled actions, animations and sound to bulletin board system. The system was born on the Amiga in 1987 in the Skyline BBS package. Skypix was probably the world's first modern, fully interactive online graphics-and-sound protocol. Released as part of the Atredes BBS (later renamed Skyline) in 1987, Skypix for the first time allowed BBS sysops to run systems with graphics, fonts, mouse-controlled actions, animations and sound. *** ^[ [^PM](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=kittens_from_space) ^| [^Exclude ^me](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiTextBot&me ssage=Excludeme&subject=Excludeme) ^| [^Exclude ^from ^subreddit](https://np.reddit.com/r/bbs/about/banned) ^| [^FAQ ^/ ^Information](https://np.reddit.com/r/WikiTextBot/wiki/index) ^] ^Downvote ^to ^remove ^| ^v0.23 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- NuSkooler · 2017-06-28 04:15 There are actually a lot of modern terminal applications (and a few games) that utilize Unicode characters via UTF-8. There is no reason why new doors could not do this, but would clearly limit the terminals that one could use.