Defenders of Zentax

Defenders of Zentax is an overhead ANSI-graphic BBS-based RPG, set in the future. It has real-time multiplayer support, for bulletin board systems which use multiple nodes. There is also a built-in scripting language, allowing anyone to write their own adventures.

Initially developed by FyberOptic in the summer of 1996, the game progressed steadily in development, being heavily influenced by the popular Legend of the Red Dragon 2 BBS game by Seth Able Robinson.

The game was alpha-tested by fellow BBS acquaintances Methos and Woody, the former of which would later be responsible for the creation of the initial DOZ website due to FyberOptic's lack of internet access at the time. This website would later become home to Planet Zentax.

A beta version was released publicly in 1998 via Fidonet to somewhat mediocre response. While never receiving any actual negative feedback, the amount of positive feedback was indicative of the unfortunate decline in BBS activity across the country, due to the increasing popularity of the internet. Nevertheless, FyberOptic continued working on the project, since a few BBS's in various parts of the country were running the beta, but his interest slowly faded away as all of his local BBS systems did.

At the time, DOZ was FyberOptic's first attempt at creating any major piece of software, which resulted in learning a lot in terms of computer programming and game development. The game was written in Turbo Pascal 7, using the DDPlus communication routines library.

The downloadable version of the game was later patched to avoid the Turbo Pascal divide by zero error which occured on PCs faster than 200mhz, leaving it capable of still being run on modern machines.