Anyone ever used my Dungeons & Dragons program in the 1980s?

[atarialoha]

18 minutes ago, Dr Memory said:

I ran a pretty big BBS in SoCal but I doubt if it migrated that far.  Still, I'll try and find my archives and see if it made it here.

 

Unfortunate that you didn't try distributing on CI$ - I'm sure there are archives of that around.  They got a lot of my money too.    People tried to mirror the big pay sites as they went down, or so I've heard.

Wow! Mirror CompuServe? Storage would be trivial now, with terabytes on hard disks, but just 10 years ago even it would have been expensive, not to mention 20 years ago? When did they go down? I guess AOL was the last big non-Internet online "walled garden" to go.

[Dr Memory]

Well I don't know that you'd need to mirror all of it.  I guess someone might have, but more likely the file sections got snagged and saved.  I have vague memories of this sort of thing happening but the details have gone, sorry.

[+x=usr(1536)]

58 minutes ago, Dr Memory said:

I ran a pretty big BBS in SoCal but I doubt if it migrated that far.

Out of curiosity, which one and over which years?

[Dr Memory]

Compulsive Collector BBS, for over a decade.  Something like 1982, well into the 90s?  The last snapshot I have from the 800/ATR8000 version is from 1985 but I switched to an ST and kept going for many years after that.  I don't find the ST as interesting from a nostalgia point of view and thus haven't even tried to find the later ST versions.

 

It was pretty highly customized.  Towards the end I was running 4 8" emulators (well that's what we called them back then) and had my user file, message board indexes and download file system indexes all running in bank switched memory using my own little assembly routines.  Manually implemented write-back cache and such.  So it was large and fast for the time.

 

Every now and then I think about trying to bring it back up but it would be a fair amount of work, as I no longer have the ATR8000 and accompanying hardware and bank switched memory is handled a lot differently these days.  Plus, all the files you could possibly want are available elsewhere, as are f2p games far better than the doors I ran.    So probably not.

[atarialoha]

6 minutes ago, Dr Memory said:

Compulsive Collector BBS, for over a decade.  Something like 1982, well into the 90s?  The last snapshot I have from the 800/ATR8000 version is from 1985 but I switched to an ST and kept going for many years after that.  I don't find the ST as interesting from a nostalgia point of view and thus haven't even tried to find the later ST versions.

 

It was pretty highly customized.  Towards the end I was running 4 8" emulators (well that's what we called them back then) and had my user file, message board indexes and download file system indexes all running in bank switched memory using my own little assembly routines.  Manually implemented write-back cache and such.  So it was large and fast for the time.

 

Every now and then I think about trying to bring it back up but it would be a fair amount of work, as I no longer have the ATR8000 and accompanying hardware and bank switched memory is handled a lot differently these days.  Plus, all the files you could possibly want are available elsewhere, as are f2p games far better than the doors I ran.    So probably not.

I agree with your decision not to do it. It would be a novel thing for maybe 5 minutes. The requirements of landlines, long distance charges, limited number of phone lines, and (most important of all) almost no user activity, would kill the cool factor quickly. A lot of BBS activity was checking and posting messages, which we do on the Web nowadays. It was such a cool thing to be able to reach out and contact people back in the day, just via your computer. And see what new files were available for download.

[Dr Memory]

Well... I wouldn't do it that way, I'd probably set it up on a Fujinet so it could be accessed on the Internet.  The problem is that I had so much weird hardware and customization that it wouldn't be easy to adapt.  Agree with your overall conclusion though - I suspect it would be cool for a few minutes and then fade into obscurity.  Oh well.

 

Alternatively, I could emulate it entirely, using Altirra or Atari800Win, but then it would lose a lot of the coolness, such as it is.

 

Oh I looked through what I could find of my archives and did not find DMAIDE.  Sorry, no joy.

[+DrVenkman]

Vestiges of CompuServe survived a lot longer than most people realize:

 

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/compuserve-forums-rip/

[tabar]

Does anyone know where the schematic for the Dragonbone could be found? just saw the post and haven't done any searches yet.

[atarialoha]

8 hours ago, Dr Memory said:

Well... I wouldn't do it that way, I'd probably set it up on a Fujinet so it could be accessed on the Internet.  The problem is that I had so much weird hardware and customization that it wouldn't be easy to adapt.  Agree with your overall conclusion though - I suspect it would be cool for a few minutes and then fade into obscurity.  Oh well.

 

Alternatively, I could emulate it entirely, using Altirra or Atari800Win, but then it would lose a lot of the coolness, such as it is.

 

Oh I looked through what I could find of my archives and did not find DMAIDE.  Sorry, no joy.

Thanks for searching.

[atarialoha]

5 hours ago, tabar said:

Does anyone know where the schematic for the Dragonbone could be found? just saw the post and haven't done any searches yet.

I couldn't find any but it probably wouldn't be too hard to do today with a PIC chip and LEDs?

[atarialoha]

8 hours ago, DrVenkman said:

Vestiges of CompuServe survived a lot longer than most people realize:

 

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/compuserve-forums-rip/

Take a look:

 

https://member.compuserve.com