Kirkman

September 27, 2020

Thanks, DarkLord!

I submitted the story, interview, and source code repo to Slashdot -- and to my surprise, it made the front page. Pretty exciting! Hopefully it introduced many folks to the quirks and wonders of the Atari ST and BBSing worlds.

September 20, 2020

On 9/17/2020 at 3:52 PM, MrMaddog said:

So this also works using Hatari as well as a real ST?

Yes, the “Thieves Guild emulator” can be run inside Hatari, but you’ll need a telnet->serial connection, either by hardware (WiFi modem or Lantronix) or software (tcpser).

FWIW, I recently updated my tutorial on using tcpser and socat on a Mac. https://breakintochat.com/blog/2020/09/03/tutorial-telnet-to-a-bbs-using-a-terminal-program-in-the-hatari-emulator/

September 16, 2020

Also, check out my interview with Paul Witte, who wrote Thieves' Guild, and his friend Herb Flower, who made all the art for the graphical front-end:

https://breakintochat.com/blog/2020/09/15/paul-witte-and-herb-flower-creators-of-thieves-guild/

They met at a Utah Atari users group, where Witte was blown away by Flower's submission in a NEOchrome art contest.

"It was these swirling purple clouds and stuff," Witte said. They later incorporated that image into the ending of Thieves' Guild.

September 16, 2020

Yes, a real ST and a WiFi modem are the perfect way to do it.

September 15, 2020

37 minutes ago, Tillek said:

Wow! Saving the source code is a feat in itself. Now I'm going to have to play it (and win it).

Of course I have to fix the games on my BBS first.

BTW... Did get your email. I'm trying to get my games back online (which requires me getting it back working on the Mega STE).

Yes, I'm so excited about that!

I even made a discovery in the source today that I hadn't noticed before -- Paul had a commented-out "insta-travel" feature that apparently was intended for use in a CompuServe demo, which corroborates what he told me about CS negotiating to license the game.

I hope the games fall into place. Having finally set up a barebones private BBS on my own Mega STe so I could play TG, I can appreciate the difficulty involved.

September 15, 2020

4 minutes ago, myriadcs said:

Interesting read.

BTW. Link to your page is broken, it displays your blog address but links to this page

Thanks so much! Hopefully I have fixed it.

September 15, 2020

Some of you have probably seen posts from me over the years trying to work out how to play Thieves' Guild using its graphical front-end client ... over telnet, inside an emulator, etc. So many failed attempts!

But at last I have done it. I finished the game! And I'd like to share with you the fruits of my seven-year labor.

Please check out my blog post: https://breakintochat.com/blog/2020/09/15/thieves-guild-memories/

It's a deep deep dive into the game, chock full of screenshots, videos, and more.

ALSO -- I have saved the source code for the game! Paul Witte has given me permission to share it with the community.

June 6, 2020

I just realized the front of the castle has a giant "H." Herb confirms this is deliberate.

June 4, 2020

Recently I've been interviewing Paul Witte and Herb Flower about their BBS door game Thieves' Guild (play it on Dark Force!) in preparation for some future blog posts. Herb made some really cool pixel art for the TG front-end client that has always impressed me. Anyway, Paul and Herb told me that Herb had an unreleased game that he wrote in the late 80s in GFA BASIC, called "Dark Fortress." They mailed the disk to me, and I managed to recover the game.

Anyway, you can download the game, learn more about gameplay, and read a short essay from Herb about its creation here:

https://breakintochat.com/blog/2020/06/04/unearthed-dark-fortress-for-the-atari-st/

May 30, 2020

I was going through my Atari ST disks recently and found a cassette tape I had long forgotten. I had used the tape to store BASIC programs I typed in from various Compute! and Antic books as a kid. I wrote about converting the tape to a .CAS file and trying to figure out where all the programs came from:

https://breakintochat.com/blog/2020/05/30/unearthed-my-atari-8-bit-cassette-tape/

It was a fun research challenge tracking down each program, but perhaps my favorite nerdy part was diffing the source listings of the programs to see where I had made mistakes, or where I had customized the programs.

May 25, 2020

2 hours ago, Tillek said:

Did you figure out how to get your O: back though? (I assume that's your network one?) I haven't been able to get mine working since I updated.

Yes, re-flashing the internal SD card did the trick for me.

Of course, after doing that I had to manually re-set all the preferences in CE_CONF (ACSI IDs, IP address, network settings, etc).

Something else that occurred to me afterward is that I probably should have replaced the CE_DD and other drivers after I did the original upgrade. Having an older CE_DD might have been what caused all the issues.

May 25, 2020

Ugh, I'm an idiot. I had two parts of the IP address reversed.

I can't figure out how to delete this topic on my own, but mods feel free to do so.

May 25, 2020

Hi everyone... I have a v1 CE that I've used for many years with my Mega STe. Recently I updated it and it began giving me trouble.

On boot, the CE would say "Looking for CosmosEx on ACSI" and it would run through various numbers, but it would never succeed. I would quit out of this and the Atari desktop would appear. My SD card hard drive would mount properly, but not the O: Config drive or my N: shared drive (NFS).

Since the O: drive didn't mount, I couldn't launch CE_CONF on the Atari. Instead I decided to try to SSH into the CE from my Mac. I've done it in the past, but this time it didn't work. When I tried the SSH command, it just sat there until eventually it timed out.

Today I decided to pull out the CE's internal SD card and re-flash it with the latest Raspbian Stretch image, which I found on Jookie's webpage.

This seems to have solved most of the problems. The Atari sees the CE again, and the O: and N: drives now mount properly. CE_CAST is working, and I can access the screencast through my web browser.

The only thing that's not working is SSH access to the CE. Trying SSH continues to result in a timeout. Anyone have any ideas how I might fix that?

--Josh

May 23, 2020

Are there any ramdisk programs for the Atari ST that can install the ramdisk as drive B?

Recently I've been using Fcopy Pro to try to read stuff off old disks. I wish I could just write the data either onto my hard drive or a ramdisk. Neither of those are options are in Fcopy. The only choice is to write to drive B.

My Mega STe only has one floppy (drive A), so I wondered if any clever programmers had ever devised a way to make the RAMdisk pretend to be drive B.

August 29, 2019

On 5/26/2019 at 12:57 PM, JohnPolka said:

Does anyone still have any Instant Graphics files? Recall that Instant Graphics, or IG, was a standard for embedding graphics, sounds, and animation into text files. These were mostly used on ST BBSs in the early 90s. Users would add IG to messages that they posted. Some BBSs would also incorporate IG into their welcome screens and menus. When one runs an IG client during their BBS session, they would automatically see the IG on the BBS.

I have a very small archive of IG files I compiled from the various releases (which I posted elsewhere on the forum earlier this year). However, I found a new one today, from your Basement BBS!

Check it out:

This animation uses IG / IGS code that I copied from a 1990 message I found in this archive: http://basementbbs.ddns.net:7000/basement-msgs/base26.html

I had to make sure I saved the text file with the right encoding and line endings, but after some trial and error, I got it to play properly in Hatari.

June 7, 2019

Here are the versions of IGS I have been able to find (2.14, 2.16, 2.17) and the versions of IGS_EDIT I have found.

Also, Larry Mears ported his IGS to the PC and called it "Blue Instant Graphics" ("Blue" is a reference to IBM/Big Blue, I think). So far I have only found v1.03 of that edition, but I know other versions (and accessories) existed.

igs-versions.zip

June 6, 2019

Does anyone even still have the original ST IGS archive/file?

Seems like I found it on a CD collection somewhere is how I came across it.

I have a couple versions I have found in some archives. Ill try to email you later.

June 6, 2019

We supported ASCII, ATASCII, VT52, Instant graphics, Color Graphics System, and ANSI so I'd say yes. It certainly was supported back in the day.

So funny you should bring up Instant Graphics and Sound because I started researching it earlier this year. I got interested because, though I called several Atari 8-bit and ST BBSes in the early/mid-1990s, I never heard of it back then. It was only this year that I came across a reference to it while I was doing some new research on RIP graphics.

It looks like the IGS technique is very similar to RIP... in fact, if the history I found on an old website is accurate, there is a good chance that RIP was directly inspired by IGS.

Because they are similar, I'm thinking about taking on the project of creating an IGS renderer for HTML5 / javascript similar to my earlier ATASCII and RIP projects.

(For those unfamiliar, my HTML5 RIPscrip viewer is here: http://joshrenaud.com/experiments/ripscrip.js/. It doesn't offer 100% RIP implementation, but it works fairly well for most non-flood-fill RIP screens. This project was meant as a first step toward developing a RIP->SVG converter. I still hope to do that, but deciding what to do about RIP's flood-fill command has stymied the project for a while)

June 6, 2019

I wish to add a few atacsii vignettes into my game as it progresses. I wonder if it requires a modem line to run?

I think I have the largest archive of ATASCII animations online right now:

https://breakintochat.com/collections/atascii/

I wrote an HTML5 / javascript viewer. It's not 100% complete, but it works well enough to display most of the animations in the collection. You can run the viewer in full-screen mode, change the emulated modem speed, or turn on "diagnostic mode" to see how the cursor moves around the screen.

I am interested in looking at and watching and debugging ansi graphics for the opening screens for old school BBS's.

I found a lot a few years back but cant find it now

ANSI art and ANSI animations are easy to find online. The best archive is https://16colo.rs/, which is searchable. It includes ANSI and its spinoffs (xbin, .tnd, etc).

Also, people still create awesome ANSI art and animations today. Here are some of my pieces from the last couple years:

https://16colo.rs/pack/blocktronics-67rpm/KM-Keith-Green-For-Him-Who-Has-Ears-To-Hear.ans

https://16colo.rs/pack/blocktronics-6710/km-3-grief.xb

https://16colo.rs/pack/blocktronics_detention_block_aa-23/ANSI_Star_Wars_KM-FALC_.ANS

April 25, 2019

It's not a matter of "can"... It's a matter of "want".

I have a few Mega ST's (at least 1 mega 4) and another Mega STE that might be a quick fix... a 2nd Falcon that was flaky but I probably could get working, not to mention the TT.

I just don't want to sacrifice another machine. I've already lost a Falcon and MSTE. From what I've been told from the various people who have been out, it definitely came through the network wiring. Everything damaged (from all the neighbors) was hard wired to the network or a network device (in the case of the TV's) that was hard wired. I really think the ST's are just really sensitive to it. I don't know how well those lightning protectors work.

But even then, like I said before, this was the actual hardware the BBS ran on back in the 90's. It's more than just losing a mega STE... It's losing THAT MSTE.

And on top of that... those games? I don't think anyone plays them. Those old NeST/AtariNet archives? I don't think anyone reads them.

So it's really just a matter of how much effort, time and equipment do I throw at something that really isn't used that much. Not to mention that there are at least 3 people talking about putting BBS's up so do we really need SFHQ?

There are a lot of other things I could put my time into that would probably be more useful to more people.

All fair points. It's a tough choice, but I understand if you end up not coming back. But you definitely had a great board, even if it wasn't getting tons of calls.

You have unique content there, though, that I hope won't be lost, no matter what you decide.

In 2016 I scraped all your old Fidonet messages, but I'd love to get a copy of all the other old networked message bases you have on there.

--Josh

April 25, 2019

So far, lost a Mega STE, 42" TV, Roku box (the higher end one), the U-Verse gateway, the network switch is faulty (some bad ports), potentially damaged the MSS-100.

Not really sure how the other equipment survived (or if anything else fried that I haven't noticed yet). I'm hoping the SFHQ hard drive is ok, but until I get around to hooking it up to another system, I can't be sure.

I don't think SFHQ will be coming back unless I can somehow fix the MSTE.

Man, that sucks, Tillek. I hope you can resurrect SFHQ. You had lots of great historical messages on there, not to mention the games.

--Josh

December 11, 2017

Awesome find.

Just curious: do you have any BBS-related materials from Action Annex? Copies of door games, VT-52 or ATASCII animations, text files, etc?

April 9, 2017

So just a little news.....

I finally got my feed for Usenet Newsgroups working on SFHQ... Getting them on the BBS will take a little time since my first group of packets was apparently a rescan and ended up sending me over 120mb of messages.... for only 5 groups.

Which brings me to the question... Obviously I won't keep the entire history on the BBS. (I haven't decided how many messages I'll keep... if you have thoughts... ) But would people like the history made available as a download? (Probably in a package with the LED editor so you can read it on an ST).

I wanted to ask because there are obviously many ways to read archived news groups and unless anyone is really interested, I wasn't going to bother (besides keeping it for myself).

Personally, I think the old games and the old messages are among the most valuable things on your system. I have actually scraped most/all the Fidonet subs from your board because I am pretty sure your cache is unique.

Obviously it may not hold an attraction for a lot of folks these days, but it is the one thing you have that nobody else has ... those messages.

April 3, 2017

Just wanted to bump this since it's been nearly a year. Any former Atari 8-bit sysops or users have ATASCII animations squirreled away that they could share with me?