The Major BBS Forums (Archive)

Since Gcomm released The Major BBS for Unix, I thought that it was the perfect operating system for Gcomm. Unfortunately, Unix was pretty expensive to be succesful at that time.

What about porting The Major BBS to Linux and/or FreeBSD? Now that virtualization is possible (VMware, etc) any Windows user can have a MajorBBS for Linux running, and MacOSX and Linux users as well.

I don't know if porting GSBL to Linux would be too difficult, but it will open us a ton of MUDs written for Linux that are explendid, remove ICO from the core, etc...

What do you think about this?

Amando

amando wrote:Since Gcomm released The Major BBS for Unix, I thought that it was the perfect operating system for Gcomm. Unfortunately, Unix was pretty expensive to be succesful at that time.

What about porting The Major BBS to Linux and/or FreeBSD? Now that virtualization is possible (VMware, etc) any Windows user can have a MajorBBS for Linux running, and MacOSX and Linux users as well.

I don't know if porting GSBL to Linux would be too difficult, but it will open us a ton of MUDs written for Linux that are explendid, remove ICO from the core, etc...

What do you think about this?

Amando

A few things about The Major BBS for UNIX and Worldgroup for UNIX:

- They ran on Linux 1.x, BSD 2.0, UnixWare 2.0.1, Solaris 2.x (SPARC), SCO 3.2v4, and OSF1 3.0 (ALPHA).
- All were x86 except Solaris and OSF1.
- GSBL port to UNIX was basically the DOS ASM GSBL rewritten in C. This GSBL became the core of the Worldgroup for NT product.

- It would NOT remove ICO from the core, as it still is a single process application that would not take advantage of OS services (not a bad thing)
- It would NOT open MBBS/WG to Linux MUDs, as they'd still have to be coded specifically as a WG module.

The only real difference between the products is that one ran on DOS, the other ran under UNIX, Linux, and BSD.

Questman wrote:

amando wrote:Since Gcomm released The Major BBS for Unix, I thought that it was the perfect operating system for Gcomm. Unfortunately, Unix was pretty expensive to be succesful at that time.

What about porting The Major BBS to Linux and/or FreeBSD? Now that virtualization is possible (VMware, etc) any Windows user can have a MajorBBS for Linux running, and MacOSX and Linux users as well.

I don't know if porting GSBL to Linux would be too difficult, but it will open us a ton of MUDs written for Linux that are explendid, remove ICO from the core, etc...

What do you think about this?

Amando

A few things about The Major BBS for UNIX and Worldgroup for UNIX:

- They ran on Linux 1.x, BSD 2.0, UnixWare 2.0.1, Solaris 2.x (SPARC), SCO 3.2v4, and OSF1 3.0 (ALPHA).
- All were x86 except Solaris and OSF1.
- GSBL port to UNIX was basically the DOS ASM GSBL rewritten in C. This GSBL became the core of the Worldgroup for NT product.

- It would NOT remove ICO from the core, as it still is a single process application that would not take advantage of OS services (not a bad thing)
- It would NOT open MBBS/WG to Linux MUDs, as they'd still have to be coded specifically as a WG module.

The only real difference between the products is that one ran on DOS, the other ran under UNIX, Linux, and BSD.

I have toyed around with MajorBBS / Unix in the past....

And, for fun, I had begun to implement an API compatible clone. However, some of the functions are so cryptic that I can't even render a guess as to what they are.

Everything I've done thus far has been straight up C. My planned architecture is to launch the caller interface from the telnet daemon or getty directly.

This should eliminate the complexity of the state machine, and allow the sysop to relink the executable with new addons, test, and deploy -- without needing to bring down the whole board.

I plan to do multicast communication between the caller interfaces, and use SQL instead of Btrieve calls.

Granted, I've only written about 1000 lines of code so far, and have devoted about 30 hours to this over the past 4 years.

Nevertheless, it is a fun project to tool around on.

Does anyone have any developer docs? I remember a coding standards doc and an api reference.... These would be immensely helpful.

--phil

pheller wrote:

Questman wrote:

amando wrote:Since Gcomm released The Major BBS for Unix, I thought that it was the perfect operating system for Gcomm. Unfortunately, Unix was pretty expensive to be succesful at that time.

What about porting The Major BBS to Linux and/or FreeBSD? Now that virtualization is possible (VMware, etc) any Windows user can have a MajorBBS for Linux running, and MacOSX and Linux users as well.

I don't know if porting GSBL to Linux would be too difficult, but it will open us a ton of MUDs written for Linux that are explendid, remove ICO from the core, etc...

What do you think about this?

Amando

A few things about The Major BBS for UNIX and Worldgroup for UNIX:

- They ran on Linux 1.x, BSD 2.0, UnixWare 2.0.1, Solaris 2.x (SPARC), SCO 3.2v4, and OSF1 3.0 (ALPHA).
- All were x86 except Solaris and OSF1.
- GSBL port to UNIX was basically the DOS ASM GSBL rewritten in C. This GSBL became the core of the Worldgroup for NT product.

- It would NOT remove ICO from the core, as it still is a single process application that would not take advantage of OS services (not a bad thing)
- It would NOT open MBBS/WG to Linux MUDs, as they'd still have to be coded specifically as a WG module.

The only real difference between the products is that one ran on DOS, the other ran under UNIX, Linux, and BSD.

I have toyed around with MajorBBS / Unix in the past....

And, for fun, I had begun to implement an API compatible clone. However, some of the functions are so cryptic that I can't even render a guess as to what they are.

Everything I've done thus far has been straight up C. My planned architecture is to launch the caller interface from the telnet daemon or getty directly.

This should eliminate the complexity of the state machine, and allow the sysop to relink the executable with new addons, test, and deploy -- without needing to bring down the whole board.

I plan to do multicast communication between the caller interfaces, and use SQL instead of Btrieve calls.

Granted, I've only written about 1000 lines of code so far, and have devoted about 30 hours to this over the past 4 years.

Nevertheless, it is a fun project to tool around on.

Does anyone have any developer docs? I remember a coding standards doc and an api reference.... These would be immensely helpful.

--phil

yeah i have an extremely large file archive with a ton of helpful stuff including all the developer docs,coding standards,etc....

arcticzone.dyndns.org

What about running WG 3.3 under WINE? Has anbody got that to work?

Megamud runs under it, would be nice if WG did. Could get away from dam windows.

Shawn

amando wrote:Since Gcomm released The Major BBS for Unix, I thought that it was the perfect operating system for Gcomm. Unfortunately, Unix was pretty expensive to be succesful at that time.

What about porting The Major BBS to Linux and/or FreeBSD? Now that virtualization is possible (VMware, etc) any Windows user can have a MajorBBS for Linux running, and MacOSX and Linux users as well.

I don't know if porting GSBL to Linux would be too difficult, but it will open us a ton of MUDs written for Linux that are explendid, remove ICO from the core, etc...

What do you think about this?

Amando

WGNT can be built using unix,linux,etc....

i have worldgroup 1.01 for unix if interested in checking it out.

pheller wrote:

Questman wrote:

amando wrote:Since Gcomm released The Major BBS for Unix, I thought that it was the perfect operating system for Gcomm. Unfortunately, Unix was pretty expensive to be succesful at that time.

What about porting The Major BBS to Linux and/or FreeBSD? Now that virtualization is possible (VMware, etc) any Windows user can have a MajorBBS for Linux running, and MacOSX and Linux users as well.

I don't know if porting GSBL to Linux would be too difficult, but it will open us a ton of MUDs written for Linux that are explendid, remove ICO from the core, etc...

What do you think about this?

Amando

A few things about The Major BBS for UNIX and Worldgroup for UNIX:

- They ran on Linux 1.x, BSD 2.0, UnixWare 2.0.1, Solaris 2.x (SPARC), SCO 3.2v4, and OSF1 3.0 (ALPHA).
- All were x86 except Solaris and OSF1.
- GSBL port to UNIX was basically the DOS ASM GSBL rewritten in C. This GSBL became the core of the Worldgroup for NT product.

- It would NOT remove ICO from the core, as it still is a single process application that would not take advantage of OS services (not a bad thing)
- It would NOT open MBBS/WG to Linux MUDs, as they'd still have to be coded specifically as a WG module.

The only real difference between the products is that one ran on DOS, the other ran under UNIX, Linux, and BSD.

I have toyed around with MajorBBS / Unix in the past....

And, for fun, I had begun to implement an API compatible clone. However, some of the functions are so cryptic that I can't even render a guess as to what they are.

Everything I've done thus far has been straight up C. My planned architecture is to launch the caller interface from the telnet daemon or getty directly.

This should eliminate the complexity of the state machine, and allow the sysop to relink the executable with new addons, test, and deploy -- without needing to bring down the whole board.

I plan to do multicast communication between the caller interfaces, and use SQL instead of Btrieve calls.

Granted, I've only written about 1000 lines of code so far, and have devoted about 30 hours to this over the past 4 years.

Nevertheless, it is a fun project to tool around on.

Does anyone have any developer docs? I remember a coding standards doc and an api reference.... These would be immensely helpful.

--phil

yes i have developer docs, mcv api docs, pretty much anything ya coul;d need as reference.

send me a site ill upload em to ya since my bbs is down til mediacomm gets off their ass and services a $149 a month paying customer versus lazy backwoods dont wanna pay for shit bastards that are splitting off the lines to get free cable.

Does anyone have MBBS or WG code for Unix? Please email me mark@tqhosting.com and I will host anything. Really interested in seeing something that works, even if it is Linux 1.x or Solaris 2.5 sparc.

sloop wrote:Does anyone have MBBS or WG code for Unix? Please email me mark@tqhosting.com and I will host anything. Really interested in seeing something that works, even if it is Linux 1.x or Solaris 2.5 sparc.

Been looking for a while - it wasn't properly archived in the source code version control systems, and, as such, is lost - none of the developers have it anymore, either. I have the binaries, of course, but that's not much help.

If you look at the NT code, though, you'll see some #ifdefs in there with UNIX specific code. It might not take THAT much work to do.. but... who has the time?

sloop wrote:Does anyone have MBBS or WG code for Unix? Please email me mark@tqhosting.com and I will host anything. Really interested in seeing something that works, even if it is Linux 1.x or Solaris 2.5 sparc.

yeah as rick said theres alot of calling for unix in it but i dont know anyone who has attempted it.

i have wg 1.01 for unix if ya wanna try it.

Questman wrote:

amando wrote:Since Gcomm released The Major BBS for Unix, I thought that it was the perfect operating system for Gcomm. Unfortunately, Unix was pretty expensive to be succesful at that time.

What about porting The Major BBS to Linux and/or FreeBSD? Now that virtualization is possible (VMware, etc) any Windows user can have a MajorBBS for Linux running, and MacOSX and Linux users as well.

I don't know if porting GSBL to Linux would be too difficult, but it will open us a ton of MUDs written for Linux that are explendid, remove ICO from the core, etc...

What do you think about this?

Amando

A few things about The Major BBS for UNIX and Worldgroup for UNIX:

- They ran on Linux 1.x, BSD 2.0, UnixWare 2.0.1, Solaris 2.x (SPARC), SCO 3.2v4, and OSF1 3.0 (ALPHA).
- All were x86 except Solaris and OSF1.
- GSBL port to UNIX was basically the DOS ASM GSBL rewritten in C. This GSBL became the core of the Worldgroup for NT product.

- It would NOT remove ICO from the core, as it still is a single process application that would not take advantage of OS services (not a bad thing)
- It would NOT open MBBS/WG to Linux MUDs, as they'd still have to be coded specifically as a WG module.

The only real difference between the products is that one ran on DOS, the other ran under UNIX, Linux, and BSD.

in regards to the muds i'd say about 70% of the ones i have seen have built in rlogin support, so just make an rlogin module with the command string <ip address> and it will connect.
to take advantage of the rlogins ability to accept username input or if its running on a non standard rlogin port
i made an rlogin mod to galrlgn where you can now go

module page: Rlogin Client

command string:

<ip address > -p # (1-65535) -u <sends your user-id>
or -h <sends a custom username from galrlgn.dat>

not that you would want to tie up your tcp handles to rlogin out to a mud server but i have seen some sysops running wg as a gateway to external server such as twgs/mud's etc.

We had waited with baited breath for the Unix version but after finding out it was not going to really take any advantage of the OS it was ported to we dropped it like a bad habit and wrote our own unix based system that would toss a user out to the back-ended 6.25 systems on an as-needed basis seamlessly through the menuing system as well as other service offerings like shell accounts, other BBS's connected through our network, etc.

Nostalgia has gotten the best of me again, and I'm back working on my API compatible clone.

Teaser:



I'm about 30% done with the GSBL, and 60% with "cnf". Next will be bbsdraw based on a fork of duhdraw.

I'll put up a CVS repository or something if anyone is interested.

pheller wrote:Nostalgia has gotten the best of me again, and I'm back working on my API compatible clone.

Teaser:



I'm about 30% done with the GSBL, and 60% with "cnf". Next will be bbsdraw based on a fork of duhdraw.

I'll put up a CVS repository or something if anyone is interested.

GSBL? that would be the only part i would leave out.

dspain wrote: GSBL? that would be the only part i would leave out.

Well, in my terse glance, it would seem that addons seem to call GSBL functions. And, one of my goals is to implement binary translation for the compiled addons. So, it'll be far easier to just duplicate the GSBL api for this purpose....