The Major BBS Forums (Archive)

I've started working on a Sysop's Resource Center. It's pretty small and bare at the moment but will eventually have all types of tutorials, files, and information for general bbs-related stuff.

Currently, it has a few php fixes I made, a small PCBoard page, and a tutorial on how to setup your own doorgame scoreboard, which several people have asked about.

http://nostalgiabbs.servebbs.net/member ... /index.htm

Tonight, I've finished up adding my various PHP Fixes for several php games on the sysop resource center pages. Some of them are to prevent e-mail validation, some to change the registration system, one to prevent authentication in a who's online set of scripts, and one that fixes a bug that makes the game want to re-authenticate with out checking to make sure you're already authenticated on certain pages and then shows a bunch of errors when doing so.

I've got most of the scrip fixes put on the site that I'm actually going to put on there, unless I figure out something else to put on it. I will probably eventually put my changes of legend of the green dragon on-line as well. In their license agreement, they make you have to give your code changes out to the public if you run a public server.

Looking at your docs I seen this and tried it
DEVICE=c:\dos\emm386.exe 2000

The board would not load, gave me an out of memory. This is what I have in thier

DEVICE=c:\dos\emm386.exe D=64

Any ideas on that?

If you load too many modules on worldgroup, I don't think you can run a memory manager, because you will only have about 12 megs to work with. That being said, in your autoexec.bat file, load all of your drivers with the LH (load high) command and see what happens.

On my setup, it takes about every bit of RAM I have to use that config.sys setup and the DMA server, which has about 12-15 modules and includes a very ram hungry majormud.

I can't remember exactly all of the buffers/ram adjustment settings I used on MajorMud, but it may not have run stock either with all of my other modules. That's why I didn't include a MajorMud optimization tutorial but will eventually go through the configuration and write one hopefully.

Thanks I'll try the loading HIGH or check what I have in thier in the AM. Yeah a a MajorMud optimization tutorial would be great, mine causes so much lag its crazy.

The main reason I chose to run those memory managers was so that I could run smartdrv and ramdrive. If you run a whole lot of modules, then it's probably best not to run a memory manager at all.

As far as MajorMud is concerned, there is an option in the configuration that will let you either load the buffers fast or slow. On the slow setting, it allows your BBS to become a little more bearable while it loads its buffers, but it may take 4 hours or more to do so. On the faster settings, it'll probably load within two hours but the board may be unbearable to play on. Even if the board itself isn't unbearable, MajorMud itself would be.

I haven't tampered with the settings to know whether or not you can make it load in let's say 30 minutes or something but I'll look in to it tomorrow sometime.

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If you do decide to take out the memory managers, you'll also have to take out the ramdrive and smartdrv and change the bbs settings back to using your c drive or whatever for the swapfile. I could only find a couple references of features which use the swapfile. So, it wouldn't be that big of a deal anyway.

The setting that you change to determine the buffer loading times and how they are loaded in MajorMud is called INITRATE. The lower the number, the longer it takes to buffer. The higher the number, the more ram it will take to buffer.

If you set the INITRATE on maximum (20000 I think), it takes a lot longer for system startup and cleanups, but I believe it actually loads all buffers by the time the system starts. I can tell this by the hard drive light not going off when loading was complete and response time at 1ms at the console.

Just to load majormud and 1 or 2 other small modules, it took around four or five minutes like this.

Even though the response time was 1ms, it's not the same when you actually go in to majormud. It's around 50-58 when you're playing. I'll keep my test server up for a few hours and make sure that the response time doesn't go down over time.

There are many buffer settings in the majormud settings, but each one will have its own advantages and disadvantages. To free up ram, you'll want to run minimum recommended settings, but freeing up ram means that there will be more loading and such, especially if a lot of players are in the game.

Well, after a little more messing around with the configuration, I was able to get a very minimal response time increase, average about 4-10 ms less than with the minimum settings.

With most majormud buffer settings, I set at the default settings or slightly higher. With the roombuff settings, I set it at 3000 or so, and it makes the board load up time about another minute or two.

It's not currently possible to set all of the buffers to as high as they will go, because they work hand in hand. If you adjust one really high, you may have to adjust another lower, or you'll get a PLFILE error.

Reading the configuration stuff, you'd think the PL error would only occur when you mess with the roombuff settings, but I originally had the roombuff set to 5000 with no problems, but when I adjusted other buffer settings, I got the error and had to lower several to get the board to boot up.

On my current DMA server setup, with out the roombuffs and such adjusted yet, I actually logged on while some one else was playing infinity complex, and I went in to majormud, and the response time went to 100ms. I will try to adjust the buffer settings on that server when I get time and when no one is playing on it. Maybe that 4-10 ms less I got from the test server, which is half the cpu speed of the real one, will turn in to more than that. We'll just have to wait and see.

From what I can tell, majormud probably shouldn't have ever been made for DOS at all.

Just a little majormud update.. Apparently, it's going to do some type of buffer loading no matter what your buffer configuration is on it.. I just checked out my majormud game with the 20000 initrate, and although the response time was like 50ms or so with one person in the game this morning, it was actually only 1ms tonight.

MajorMud is a weird beast