Dosbox Config for headless/Telnet acceptance
reddit / bbs

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Patient-Tech · 2023-12-05 23:28

A lot of us either find some old floppies, or the installation for our
old bbs software but not sure what to do with it.

Something I did a long while back was get a super low spec VM (from
lowendbox) for something like 1gb ram, 1 vCPU, an IPv4 address and an
few GB of space for a buck a month or something.

I installed Dosbox on that VM and ran some configurations that let me
run old school Renegade bbs, in the cloud, headless, and accept telnet
connections.  Here's something to get you started.

I recommend running this in something like a SCREEN tty session or
have it run the bash script on reboot.  You won't see anything on the
screen as this is run from the command line over ssh and then once up
and running you can connect on the telnet port at your IP.

I suggest that you configure the admin menu on your board on your
local dosbox instance and then  you can use 7zip to archive it all up,
then an older version of Kitty (fork of PUtty) to upload it with
zmodem! (How fitting-[https://lonesysadmin.net/2008/04/09/i-still-use-
zmodem/](https://lonesysadmin.net/2008/04/09/i-still-use-zmodem/))
then you execute it to run on the server:

​

My execution batch file that points to the dosbox config file:

\#!/bin/bash

\#My First Script

\#Don't Forget chmod 755  this file

cd /home/board/renegade

SDL\_VIDEODRIVER=dummy dosbox -conf n1.conf

\-------------------------------------------------Excerpts inside the
n1.conf file which is the dosbox configutation file---

serial1=modem listenport:31337

serial2=disabled

serial3=disabled

serial4=disabled

\----------------------------

\[autoexec\]

\# Lines in this section will be run at startup.

\# You can put your MOUNT lines here.

mount c /home/board/renegade

c:

cd fossil

fci.exe

cd\\rg

renegade.exe -N1

​

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ten-oh-four · 2023-12-06 00:03

Nice tutorial!

One thing to try if you're interested would be to use something modern
like Mystic as sort of a front-end. This can take advantage of
Mystic's ability to handle both telnet and ssh, but also its bot
blocking logic, IP blocking logic, intrusion detection/prevention.
Following that, I think it's possible to actually run Renegade
multinode but by using dosemu2 instead of dosbox.

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Patient-Tech · 2023-12-06 00:08

Interesting, I’ll have to look into it.  I do know the command line
DOSBOX can use the most potato of VM’s so you might even try the free
tier micro Vm offerings from Amazon/google.

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BryanLee35 · 2023-12-06 14:39

Hi ten-oh-four,   is it really possible to have Mystic answer the
connection on SSH and pass the connection over a DOSBox telnet BBS?
If so that would be awesome!

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ten-oh-four · 2023-12-06 17:06

Yep. As long as you can launch the BBS like a door it should be
possible.