Tag: bbs
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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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Tutorial: Telnet to a BBS using a terminal program in the Hatari emulator
I’ve written in the past about my adventures telnetting to BBSes from terminal programs running inside the Hatari emulator. I’ve made some changes in my process and I thought it would be good to explain everything, step-by-step. It’s not for the novice, but it is rewarding.
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Slack API documentation mentions BBS door games
I discovered tonight that Slack’s API documentation has a page which uses a list of BBS door games as an example of how to create option fields. Pretty wild. I would love to know who was responsible for that. Whoever you are, my hat’s off to you!
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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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Archiving 300,000 Fidonet messages
In 2015, I began looking for archives of networked BBS messageboards, hoping to find contemporary discussions of BBS door games from the 1990s. The best source I found was the fidonet.ozzmosis.com archive. The Ozzmosis archive is awesome — and it’s still active, archiving any new messages posted to Fidonet. (yes, Fidonet still exists!) But I…
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Who needs SVG when you’ve got ANSI?
Presidential election years are great times to work at a news organization. As a designer at a newspaper, I love to explore the cool election maps developed by folks at places like the New York Times or the Guardian. My favorite is probably the 2016 Election Forecast from FiveThirtyEight.com, which is full of cool visualizations,…
