Subject: Re: [TI994A] Other BBS software

From: Owen Brand <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 09 Jun 2013 19:24:04 -0600

Sounds fascinating!  I'd love to see it operating.  :)  Any chance we could see a harmlesslion dial up in the near future??

Owen Brand
Opry99er

Tursi <[email-masked]> wrote:

>>Also, are there any other BBS software packages for the /4a?
>
>I was always frustrated by the low speed of Extended BASIC based BBS 
>packages, especially since I was invariably calling long distance back in 
>the day. ;) I wrote my own, FlipTerm, in C99 and assembly. It was designed 
>to be a message board, rather than a file board (though it supports the bare 
>minimum of file transfers). It also supported online games, and I had a 
>handful of them (they also had to be EA#5 program image files and return to 
>the BBS, though).
>
>It supported auto-baud selection between 300, 1200 and 2400, and managed DTR 
>via the cassette port for hanging up. ;) It ran 80 column native to look 
>"normal" to PC callers. It supported any number of message bases, had a 
>line-based message editor, and during reading messages supported message 
>threading (ie: going back and seeing what message the current one was a 
>reply to) and automatic "read new" across all message bases.
>
>The main downside is that besides the message bases and games, it was not 
>designed to be configurable, so it was always a one-off. ;) It also required 
>a RAMdisk to run, as it ended sessions with a reset and used the MENU 
>program to take control at powerup. Still, it ran for about 4 years in 
>Ottawa quite successfully. It was a lot of fun. I did post it a while back 
>(http://www.harmlesslion.com/cgi-bin/onesoft.cgi?106) -- although I don't 
>think it would be very easy for anyone besides myself to ever get running 
>again. Might be fun to do so, though.
>

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From: "Tursi" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 9 Jun 2013 18:38:33 -0700

>Sounds fascinating! I'd love to see it operating. :) Any chance we could 
>see a harmlesslion dial up in the near future??

I ported it to Linux and ran it on my server for a while, but that was never 
the same. ;) I would like to run it through Classic99 and Telnet one day. I 
don't have a phone line, so dialup won't happen. :)

One thing that I loved about it was, because I didn't have a clock, sysops 
were expected to log in every date and type in a string for the current 
date. I had five friends helping, and you could see them argue with each 
other in the date line when you read the messages. ;)