Commodore Petscii & Amiga Ansi in MajorBBS

[Info-Seeker]

Hey Guys,

Back in the 90s I ran a couple Major BBS Dos systems, One 18 and one 20 node system. Both were internet gateways with fido access, and I eventually moved on to running Unix based ISPs and moving away from MajorBBS to hardware solutions like Livingston Portmasters and Ascend Max's for dialup access.

I came up in the 80s on the Commodore 128. Due to circumstances out of my control... The Secret service took issue with some of my online habits at the time, I missed the Amiga Scene completely. A few years ago I decided to get back in to it, broke out my 128 and deck it out, and started collecting Amiga gear trying to relive my misspent youth.

What I would really like to do is combine these 2 hobbies, BBSing on the Commodores and Amigas, and my love for MajorBBS. I have run Many BBSs in my life, starting on the 64 back in the 80s, CoSysOped on an awesome 7 node HST Dual Standard Amiga board in the 90s and my ultimate BBS achievement on MajorBBS with the 20 node system.

I curently own a UseNet provider and have some serious hardware and bandwidth in multiple DataCenters. So I was thinking, if I could run a MajorBBS system in a vmware, I could drop it on some serious hardware, dual quad core processors with 32 gigs of ram each on 100mbit link with user email, usenet access, internal chat and irc. All for the Commodores and Amigas.

The Amiga Ansi should work no problem, since its just a font on the Amiga and a standard charset. I am wondering if anyone has ever served Commodore 64 Petscii from a MajorBBS, and how hard it would be to make it work. We would obviously need a terminal detector on logon and multiple menu choices like back on the Commodore BBSs.

Does anyone think this can be done? Would you like to help, maybe CoSysOp on the system? I have all the hardware, bandwidth and connections, and have the guys in the Commodore Scene who would help design the Menus / Graphics system.

I am not a programmer, but I do have certain assets at my disposal that I do not mind sharing with responsible individuals. No irc warriors who want to attract packets or cause problems... you guys know who I mean...

I am thinking we throw up the 200 node system to start, if that starts to get busy we can put up multiple systems and link them. I never really cared for Worldgroup back in the day, the web always seemed cleaner to me, but I wouldn't mind a regular ibm / mac specific menu set also. I think if we provide UseNet access and email accounts accessible from the Commodores we should make a nice place for us in the Community.

My UseNet provider is www.DigiRock.net, and I figured the board will go on a DigiRock.net URL. We are about to relaunch the website with all new design and a monster search engine and what not...

I would love to hear what anyone thinks, what it might take to make it happen, and if anyone can help make it happen.

Thanks for allowing me access to a great system here, and I hope to one day soon be a SysOp of an awesome MajorBBS system again!

Sincerely,

Info-Seeker

[Questman]

The neat thing is you could support all of these different text formats as "languages" - in fact, that's exactly how they added RIP support!

[Info-Seeker]

Very cool.. I imagine a language prompt would be 1 of the first questions asked upon connecting. It would be nice if would could auto detect or prompt for it prior to the logon screen being displayed.

The last time I ran a board was just after worldgroup had first come out. It was still in its infancy when I had moved on to FreeBsd based systems and dedicated access servers. At the time, I didn't really care for it so never did anything with it.

I have been reading what I can, the manual that has been linked in another forum is an incomplete zip file that can not be extracted, so I have been reading whatever I could find on the net.

I have seen mention of a windows version now, as well as the dos version. Is the windows version and / or worldgroup a commercial product, or are they freely available like the dos version?

Can the dos version be run in vmware successfully or will we need a windows version for this?

[dspain]

Very cool.. I imagine a language prompt would be 1 of the first questions asked upon connecting. It would be nice if would could auto detect or prompt for it prior to the logon screen being displayed.

The last time I ran a board was just after worldgroup had first come out. It was still in its infancy when I had moved on to FreeBsd based systems and dedicated access servers. At the time, I didn't really care for it so never did anything with it.

I have been reading what I can, the manual that has been linked in another forum is an incomplete zip file that can not be extracted, so I have been reading whatever I could find on the net.

I have seen mention of a windows version now, as well as the dos version. Is the windows version and / or worldgroup a commercial product, or are they freely available like the dos version?

Can the dos version be run in vmware successfully or will we need a windows version for this?

what manual ya need try azonebbs.dyndns.org
if i dont have it online i guarantee i have it somewhere in archives not online (due to alot of sources/binaries that arent supposed to be distro'd)
but the manuals aren't a problem.

oh and back when ya ran fido gateways, did ya ever do it with frontdoor 2.02 or 2.20? i ask cause i was one of the few that broke my neck getting it to work with majorbbs, i used to run fido and qwknet hubs and servers using wwiv,vbbs, then synchronet before moving on to mbbs as my entertainment platform while leaving sync up as a door gateway.

[Info-Seeker]

Actually, I am pretty sure we ran Major Fido. It was pretty easy to set up, though I had my local fido Hub come help with the setup.

Evidently, when I came to town here, I was the first one who ever tried to upload to the local bbs's. They didn't know what to think of me, and decided to come check me out. I was only 16 at the time, so after a few hours of hanging out, I was quickly adopted in to the local computer culture. My experience on/in the Commodore boards / Commodore Scene gave me skills that were quickly adaptable to the pc scene here. It wasn't long before I was at the top of a new pyramid providing data to an ever increasing populous as it filtered down hill.

I am actually quite pleased with how that last sentence came out...

Anyways, when the news hit I was about to put up a 20 node board with Internet access, you could imagine the offers I had.

Info

[frcorey]

Very cool.. I imagine a language prompt would be 1 of the first questions asked upon connecting. It would be nice if would could auto detect or prompt for it prior to the logon screen being displayed.

The last time I ran a board was just after worldgroup had first come out. It was still in its infancy when I had moved on to FreeBsd based systems and dedicated access servers. At the time, I didn't really care for it so never did anything with it.

I have been reading what I can, the manual that has been linked in another forum is an incomplete zip file that can not be extracted, so I have been reading whatever I could find on the net.

I have seen mention of a windows version now, as well as the dos version. Is the windows version and / or worldgroup a commercial product, or are they freely available like the dos version?

Can the dos version be run in vmware successfully or will we need a windows version for this?

questman says you can run it in windows but slowly.
I have the mbbs manual in a pdf. and the wg 2 manual soon if I ever give it to don to scan.

[Info-Seeker]

Well, the reason I ask how well it works... Currently I have 5 servers running in my DC Data Center. Each one has 2 quad core cpus and 32 gigs of ram. For what I am using them, 10 servers seems to be the ideal number to run on each one. Each server is run in a VMWare environment, with a base linux install running the manager.

Because of the requirements of the servers, I was forced to upgrade my home box to a monster box in order to create the images needed to run the servers in the datacenter. So here at the house I am building 2 dual quad core xeon with 12 gigs of ram to start, with 8 terrabytes on each box.

As long as I can get MBBS Running in a vmware, I can set up the box here, then when it is ready migrate the iso over to the datacenter for the production model.

Info

[Info-Seeker]

Well guys,

I finally got around to building my Virtualized Server, and have it up and running next to me running the Latest Ubuntu 10.4 desktop, vmware 7.x something, on a dual 3gig xeon, with 4 gigs of ram.

It runs pretty smooth, and the very first thing I did was bring up my old copy of Major BBS... it took a few tries to get it running smooth, but I got it, and I am quite pleased with the results. This is not its final production environment, but is perfect for sitting at the console configuring up what I am sure will be a great addition to the community.

I have successfully got the board to play back some Commodore / Petscii menu files by creating a separate language for Petscii. However, I am still running in to some issues with the system. It seems that the board is counting the control characters that Commodore uses to change colors and other stuff as a character on the line, since most petscii graphics are full screen and just wrap at the end, there is no carriage return at the end of the line forcing the new line. This wouldn't be an issue if the board didn't see the control chars as printable characters, but since it does, I can not set the colum width to 40 chars, without screwing up the graphic. So I am going to try to put a carriage return on each line, and if that doesn't work, set a fixed line width of say 50 chars, which should be enough to include all color changes for that line, I'll just have to write a little app the pad the end of each line... hopefully that will work...

I was pretty impressed when I got the first menu to display in Commodore graphics format though... felt like a milestone.

Anyways, if anyone has any ideas on this subject, I would love to hear em. Also, if any dev tools are out there that might aid me in the development of a module, like maybe Major Pro or something, I would be interested in them as well.

take it easy guys!

Info-Seeker