Hey, what language were the games to those fossilized BBS''s written in? You know, Legend of the Red Dragon, Trade Wars, Operation: Overkill, Wasteland, etc. --- Joker2000 Stevie Ray Vaughan - The Legend

I wrote some simple BBS doors in Turbo Pascal (the old DOS version); once you had one of the basic comms libraries, it was pretty trivial. I know other people who used Turbo C.

Those games were fun!

All hail multiplayer Tradewars. One of the best games known to man!!!!

Later,
Eck

P.S. Never attack a scout marauder named the U.S.S. Corbomite.

There probably aren't any tutorials around for writing those BBS games in C/C++ are there? I mean, is it the same as writing any console app, or are there special things that need to be taken into consideration because it's located remotely or whatever?


---
Joker2000
Stevie Ray Vaughan - The Legend


Edited by - Joker2000 on August 11, 2000 4:49:07 PM

I ran a WWIV board years ago, and did some door writing for it. They key was that WWIV would redirect console I/O to and from the comm port. So basically, if you wrote a console app (text-only) and called it from the BBS, it would work. If I remember correctly, the command-line arguments gave you a structure or file name that had the user''s attributes in it (name, security level, etc.)

So the answer is: any language that can be compiled into an executable can be used to run a door program.

Well, Legend of the Red Dragon was written in Turbo Pascal. I'm not certain, but I think TW2002 was written in C... The BBS WWiV was written in Borland Turbo C/C++.

I current run a registered copy of all of the above programs (some of which come with source code ) on a BBS I run during the school year, so if anyone wants an account to compete in LORD, TradeWars2002 and BRE, just Let me know!.

As for programming for a BBS, you normally have to take care of all of the modem I/O, or make Fossil system calls, all of which are pretty complex. Some BBSes (like WWIV for example) allowed you to write a program normally, and as long as you used the regular DOS interrupts for writing and reading text, it captured them all and sent them to/from the serial ports for you.

Edited by - wasteland on August 12, 2000 7:53:13 PM

Oh, forgot to mention, I have my BBS set up using Telnet and DOSEmu, so you can telnet into it.

And I *love* the Corbomite comment

quote: Original post by wasteland
I current run a registered copy of all of the above programs (some of which come with source code ) on a BBS I run during the school year, so if anyone wants an account to compete in LORD, TradeWars2002 and BRE, just Let me know!.

BRE is awesome! I would love to make that into a modern online game. To add some excitement to it the player could control the person doing the different spy jobs (sabotage base/fortress, demoralize troops, etc).

You can check on the LORD stuff at Robinson Technologies. He has some cool info up about old skool bbs programming.

I wrote some doors and LORD IGMs in TP7.0 using a freeware fossil driver called FK_FOSSIL.



Edited by - Steven Edwards on August 12, 2000 6:28:55 PM

*Sigh*... I am so glad I saw this post... I loved BBS games... LORD and LORD II was programmed in Turbo Pascal (5.5 or 7... can''t remember) and I don''t know what the rest were. I still have the copies of these games (LORD, LORD II, BRE, TROI) if anyone wants them

They take me back *sigh*

Oh yeah, the LORD creator has his site at Robinson Technologies... Its pretty cool, and he has a new game called "Dink Smallwood" for Win9x... Go Seth Abel the bard!

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