Fybertech Forums
Projects and Development => Fybertech Projects => Topic started by: FyberOptic on August 11, 2005, 01:42:40 pm
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Anyone who was using computers 10+ years ago or so might remember the BBS days. In particular, you might remember playing the game LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon). Since I figured it had to be possible to play it again these days without a BBS, I set out to find how to do it. Now you'd think that to preserve the old days, people running modern BBS's would share how they managed to get such games working, but they've decided to keep their scripts secret. So I wrote it all myself! And I'll share all my findings here soon. For now, to connect and try it out, use:
telnet://fyber.is-a-geek.com:19000 (paste this into your browser since apparently the board won't consider it an url)
Just sign up with whatever name/pass you want, then once it gets into the game you can tell it what you really want to be called. I reckon I worked out all the bugs, but WHO KNOWS? Keep in mind that this is running off of my old laptop since my website server here surely wouldn't have enough ram for all the DOS emulation sessions, so I hope it doesn't get slow when many people connect.
I might see if I can get LORD2, Planets, and DOZ running sometime too. I'll also add a Java telnet client or something to a page on the site here so that folks don't have to use the telnet app everytime they wanna connect.
UPDATE: There's a java client linked on the front page of the site now, but it doesn't look quite as good as a standard telnet client. So I'd prolly only use it if you truly have nothing else, or if you're lazy!
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I did a big overhaul today to make the software more secure, efficient, and capable of running multiple door games, and went ahead and marked it as v0.75. The problem however is that games like LORD2 rely on the extended ascii character set, which at this point I don't know how to make work under DOSEMU (a DOS emulator for Linux). So for the moment, the only game available is still LORD. I bet Planets would work, though . . !
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/me keeps making post after post
I recompiled DOSEMU to display ANSI graphics faster, and put up Planets: The Exploration of Space (since it ran at a snail's pace before the recompile). 'Tis another game from Seth Able; most folks call it TEOS or Planets for short. LORD should run a bit faster now, too!
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I've played LORD before, but planets is a new one on me. It weren't too hard to figure out though, so~
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It's fun~
LORD now updates twice a day; still midnight like normal, but then a seperate program runs at noon which tricks it into thinking it's a new day. The only problem with this is that the game will start to think it's been running twice as many days (due to the extra maintenance cycle a day). This doesn't really affect anything, but keep that in mind whenever you view the game info.
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I'm much batter at that spaceshippery game. I killed mets in one hit rather than it being the other way around like in LORD...
Twice updates is better without being overwhelming.
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I made several improvements so I bumped the FyBBS code version to 0.76. Most notably, I wrote a custom input routine to both: limit the cpu usage while waiting for input, and check for a time-out. The latter means that if you sit there at the menu for 3 minutes without typing anything, it'll kick you off. The other improvements should improve the general speed, since it's really been getting bogged down.
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It now drops you back to the menu after you exit a game, and I added a Quit option to there to disconnect when you're done.
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Hopefully that'll prevent the odd 'uncloseable telnet window' syndrome I've gotten a couple of times.
OH YEAH AND HE ADDED LORD2. Never did track down what was causing it to spit the wrong characters out sometimes. So you look like an ascii toilet seat instead of an ascii smileyface. Works really nice anyway.
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lol he's right, it is in fact using the toilet seat character instead of the smiley face for your player icon.
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I wrote some software to read the LORD player.dat and display an almost identical player ranking window, so that you don't even have to log into the BBS. I put a link on the main BBS page, but you can get to it fralm here (http://www.fybertech.com/fybbs/lordscores.cgi) too.
Since the BBS isn't actually on the same server as the site, the stats aren't real-time, unfortunately. I've considered trying to see how well the BBS would actually run on my web server, but I'm guessing not good (due to lack of ram). So I have it configured to upload the player.dat every 5 minutes, so that it's at least semi-real-time.
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LORD is verry fun, too bad I couldn't try the other ones. It's totally like Legend of the Green Dragon though. Good work Fyber.
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I made a whole new section and moved this topic here so we can discuss the BBS games and all that hot stuff.
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I <3 LORD 2. But I keep dying. >:( Oh well, what are ya gonna do.
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I love Lord 2, but how the heck am I going to get 100 alignment...?!
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BY NOT KILLING ME DAILY MAYBE?
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Doesn't affect alignment. /kill
Anyway, in Bonetown there's a few random encounters that can affect your alignment. Well, more than out on the field at least.
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I tweaked some of the BBS code again, since the thing runs so shitty sometimes, and I think PERHAPS I've made it much more tolerable to play when multiple people are on. Let me know if you notice any difference!
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What ever you did it sure did speed things up. Usually it's pretty fussy on my computer but just now it played fine and worked with no problems or lag.
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no problems here
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Whatever you did, I can't play on the school comps anymore...something about not being able to access some file. Makes me very sad inside, cause not all the stuff shows up on my Mac.
Edit: Exact error reads - ./dosemu.bin: error while loading shared libraries: libx11.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
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Yeah I get that same error message when I try to load any of the games on both the Java version and the other one (forget it's name at the moment).
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Yeah that was a recent error that I caused last night/this morning actually. I was removing a bunch of software which is just a waste of space on that machine and apparently dosemu was compiled with its tentacles attached to some of it. So I recompiled it without that stuff and it's working o-kay now it seems. It might even be a little better without loading that extra stuff into memory.
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thats why the website wasnt working right
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It's probably something I shoulda done a long time ago, but I updated the code to mask your password with asterisks so that nobody can see you type it in.