A BBS with DOS Games (More than just text...) reddit / bbs ---------------------------------------------------------------------- snoozerd · 2019-10-27 15:55 I would like to setup a door, or series of doors that would allow the user to play games that were graphical. Like for example, Duke Nuke'm 3D, or something similar. I have a guide that shows how to do this with text based games, but, wouldn't it be cool to have DN 3D pop up instead? So does anyone have anything they are doing like this? This is the link I have now: [http://www.throwbackbbs.com/dosbox\_how to.html](http://www.throwbackbbs.com/dosbox_howto.html) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- stone_henge · 2019-10-27 16:24 Such a thing is not possible without a custom client that can change into a graphics mode. FWIW PlatoTerm and the irata.online BBS are graphical, but can't realistically support a game like Duke Nukem 3D. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Scoth42 · 2019-10-27 17:51 This isn't really going to be doable. There's no way you're going to be streaming anything graphical over a dialup connection with any kind of decent resolution or framerate. If you remember some of the early video chat stuff, you're usually looking at a postage stamp sized video at maybe 5-10 fps, tops even on 56k. That's not even getting into latency and such. There were a number of BBS Door Games with custom clients that included static images and maybe simple animations (Land of Devastation, Operation Overkill II, etc), but these were all client- side things that were just triggered by the game. There were also a few custom things like RIPTerm using RIPScript that were more like markup than streaming images, but I remember a few simple games using it. So, that leaves us with the only real possibility of a terminal program that has an integrated method of downloading prebuilt dosbox environments with games ready to go that downloads them and executes them on demand. That'd really be the only feasible way to accomplish that, and might actually be a kind of neat way of doing it if adding several steps to the process. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- CharlieBrown197 · 2019-10-27 19:42 Happy cake day! ---------------------------------------------------------------------- snoozerd · 2019-10-27 20:05 Thanks for the replies. I will continue with the text based games then. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ShooterJennings · 2019-10-28 04:50 I’ve got a question here though, could we not find a way to pass lan style data using the bbs as the hub? For instance, having a “waiting room” on a BBS that could use a protocol to communicate with two instances of Duke Nukem 3D that were waiting to communicate? I know there’s other ways of doing this but it could be cool to have game nights where you connect to a Bbs to find friends and then play Descent or Heretic or old Lan games via a connection thru the bbs. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- sonofagundam · 2019-10-28 05:38 It's definitely possible. I used to call into a BBS and play 4 player Doom II over a phone connection. What we need is something that translates the old IPX game mode into data that can be sent over telnet (assuming that's what is used to connect). ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ShooterJennings · 2019-10-28 05:53 Yes! I’ve looked up LAN over telnet which is really simple. Just connecting to an IP at port 5024. I would love to add this feature to my bbs and have game nights planned for certain games. Could be really fun. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- PraiseBobSlackOff · 2019-10-28 11:48 We used to use a client called Kali, back in the day. It turned IPX lan games into something you could play over the internet. It had a lobby, chat rooms and, I think, message board areas for discussing the games. Played a lot of Warcraft 2 that way. Once Battlenet came around, that was pretty much the end of that. It would be kind of cool to spawn Kali from a bbs, though the requisites on the client side would be cumbersome to support. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- stevebourg · 2019-11-02 07:05 One potential approach is not to feed your games' lan traffic through a bbs, but instead leverage some existing "bridge" vpn or tunnel technology, and use the bbs for setup of games and the virtual lans. I have used tinc vpn and linux gre to create a virtual lan for Appletalk over Internet, bridging in an emulated nic, and it was totally successful. So the next part is how you expose you DOS environment to a layer 2 vpn. You could give your emulated dos environment an ethernet nic, and bridge the nic into a vpn on the host, but you could probably never break out of your emulated dos environment to control a vpn at the hosting OS. So maybe you'd bridge an emulated nic with your host nic, get a tcpip stack in dos, get a vpn client in dos, and get a trigger between bbs and dialer to launch both vpn and run the game from the dos environment. Will dos have enough memory for that? Is there a layer 2 tunnel/vpn over IP for dos?