Category: BBSing
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A different way to play, part 2: Pit Terminal
This is the second installment in my series “A different way to play” about front-end clients for BBS door games. Pit Terminal James Berry’s The Pit was an action game in which players could fight each other in gladiatorial combat. In the normal ANSI version of the game, the player character and his opponent are…
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A different way to play: front-ends
This is the first installment in my series “A different way to play” about front-end clients for BBS door games. Silent. Simple. Social. I suspect that’s how many people remember BBS door games. In our memories, we recall quaint multiplayer, turn-based, text games. They lacked sophisticated graphics, music, and sound effects — significant flaws for…
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Gary Martin, creator of “TradeWars 2002”
Gary Martin created TradeWars 2002, “the granddaddy of all BBS games” which has been played by tens of thousands of enthusiasts around the world. In this interview, Martin discusses rocking the University of Kansas campus as a DJ, founding Martech Software, and running one of the biggest bulletin board systems. He also describes two tantalizing…
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New ANSImation: Star Trek: The Trouble With The Rangifer Tarandus
In December, I created a new ANSI animation for the holidays called “Star Trek: The Trouble With The Rangifer Tarandus”, which was released in Blocktronics’ “Darker Image #2” artpack. Here’s a video version of the ANSImation: But (as always), the best way to view this is to use SyncTerm to connect to my BBS, Guardian…
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New ANSImation: Star Wars opening crawl
When Star Wars debuted in 1977, the first sequence audiences took in was the iconic opening crawl: a wall of yellow text rolling up the screen, shrinking toward a vanish point in the distance. This crawl was George Lucas’ homage to the old Flash Gordon serials of the 1930s (which inspired many other parts of…
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New parallax ANSImation: Millennium Falcon dodging asteroids
I want to push boundaries. That’s what the original Star Wars films did. Industrial Light & Magic revolutionized special effects with novel new techniques for motion control and amazing model work. When I work on ANSI projects now, I try to think about ways to do things in ANSI that weren’t possible in the 1990s…
