Arcade BBS down?

Does anyone know what’s happened to the Arcade BBS filebase?

http://www.arcade.demon.co.uk/about.html seems to be online, but the FTP and Telnet both there and on arcade-bbs.net seem to be timing out.

I don’t suppose anyone knows if the filebase was mirrored anywhere?

Cheers
Phil

Harddisc failure, I believe.

The site is two parts. The hosted part, and various services running on the RiscPC. The RiscPC is…poorly.

I was looking into grabbing a copy of everything to rebuild the filenames and such, but the drive packed in beforehand. :-(

I hope something can be recovered, because there’s a lot of stuff that predates the internet and therefore doesn’t exist elsewhere.

I would assume it will also be moved to a new website if it can be saved since Demon dies completely shortly.

https://archive.org/details/ftpsites_arcade.demon.co.uk_2013.06.17

Brilliant find, well done. 877MiB. OMG!

But…

This item does not appear to have any files that can be experienced on Archive.org.

Experienced? Pffft. Bloody Americans.

Reminds me of an (Android) app where the description of what had changed was something like “Experience our brand new experience”. Gibberish!
Still, I guess it was better than Google’s habitual copy-pasting of the text “* Bug fixes and performance improvements” for pretty much every new version. Has Docs ever said anything else? :-/

Anyway, thanks for the link.

BTW – for others – you don’t need to download the entire thing. Tap on the “Show files” part, and wait ages as it tries to show a lot of files. You can then choose individual files.

I went ahead and downloaded the entire thing. I figured I’d probably want most of it, and it only took 20 minutes to download.

The file base is… sparsely populated. Either there were a lot of private files, or the sysop was kept very busy deleting junk uploads.

Downloaded it. But, how to get the filetypes back?
After unpacking it, it is all of type data.
Seems it got zipped by another OS, or unpacked and packed again?

Is there a program, which can put the filetype back?

To do it by hand is a work of several days.

Yes, generally all files are typed as data.

Only specific RISC OS comms programs (Hearsay, ArcTerm7, maybe Connector, maybe ZAnsi) provided file type information during the transfer, and only with certain protocols (mainly ZModem) by stuffing it into unused parts of the header structure.

In general, one should assume that BBS file base entries lack filetypes. Some had them, MANY did not.

The quickest method is to use a program that can recognise various types of file by looking at the contents. Various versions exist, though I can’t think of any offhand. This won’t fix everything, but ought to deal with all the regular stuff like BASIC, modules, draw, sprites, JPEGs, archives, etc etc.

PS: Note also that files may contain random rubbish at the end. Some early protocols (Xmodem) worked in blocks and didn’t actually communicate a file length.

But, how to get the filetypes back?

Every subdirectory under “Data” has a “/listing” file.

For example:

-rw-r--r--   1 DDC      Archive      2728 Oct 23  1994 042482
-rw-r--r--   1 C85      JPEG        29745 May 31  1994 042492
-rw-r--r--   1 DDC      Archive    220534 Jun  1  1994 042499

Each entry mentions the filetype twice: first as hex, then by name. The filename itself is the last item on the line. Armed with this information, it should be possible to write a program to reinstate the filetypes.

Be warned: some of the files are missing, and some have the wrong filetype.

Arcade… every Sunday I’d log on and reply to posts… started as fun, how long could we keep it going. Look back and it was over 20 years. On Arcade when it was apparent that things were moving to a conclusion we had discussions. Someone even offered to put up money to port it all. But we could not find anyone with enough enthusiasm. So the thing crashed in to the ground.

It is easy to contact the owners of Arcade – if anyone is seriously bothered and has the time to put in. But like a lot else is it worth it?

A bit more… as I recall the source to the ArcBBS software is lost, implications for moving to new hardware. There is no archive of the Arcade message base, which would have been of much historical interest.

I’ve squirrelled away lots of stuff. Anyone want to put all my old floppies online. Museum that would like all the Acorn developer material…

as I recall the source to the ArcBBS software is lost

Yes. It’s a great shame. The BBS module is tiny and written in assembler. Possibly the door module too. But they pretty much only push blocks of memory around.
The server itself does all the work, and all the bits of that are in C. So unless there’s some sort of fruity like flags in addresses, it wouldn’t have been hard to get it running on a Pi.
But, without the sources…..

There is no archive of the Arcade message base,

No, sadly due to space reasons it gets expired after so many days. I don’t recall what Arcade’s setting was, but messages didn’t go back until the beginning.

Anyone want to put all my old floppies online.

I’ve not looked at mine. Somewhere I have a box with about 200 floppies. 18 years in a damp house, they’re probably mouldy junk by now.
There’s a part of me that thinks that’s for the best. I have what I consider to be important. Mostly. ¹ Above and beyond that, I’m not going to get upset over stuff I don’t remember. As for putting it online. Nah, there’s enough crap on the internet, I don’t need to be adding to the brain farts of failing presidents and flying toasters.

¹ Missing a few things because the backup CD-R flaked apart, and I don’t know if the harddisc itself still works. But I don’t think it’s anything that would justify the time taken to rummage around and try.

Someone even offered to put up money to port it all.

No so much porting, more relocating. I’ve tried ARCbbs under Aemulor. Kind of unstable, the Door module stiffs the machine instantly. But the weekend that I left the server running on my Pi2, the machine needed rebooting in the morning. I don’t know what caused the problem, but it wasn’t stable enough to run as a server.

Which would mean using the original RiscPC. It’s possible that there might have been some milage in that, by replacing the harddiscs with more recent ones (certainly, ones that didn’t have around a quarter century of runtime). However I’m not the one to be doing something like that. I’m paranoid about thunderstorms. All of my machines have been off while I’ve been at work three days already this week, and looking like again tomorrow. All that power cycling isn’t going to sit well with old hardware and physical drives.

Plus, jeez, the costs of getting it all over to another country in one piece. I don’t even want to contemplate.

But we could not find anyone with enough enthusiasm.

Enthusiasm is one thing. Dealing with the practicalities, an entirely different thing.

Still kinda bummed that the server source is gone. Might have been fun getting it running on a modern machine. It’s certainly a lot more accomplished than my offering that will probably not be finished by the day I die… :-/ Especially since I only tinker here and there, don’t seem to have the concentration to do real work.

I’ve squirrelled away lots of stuff. Anyone want to put all my old floppies online. Museum that would like all the Acorn developer material…

I have here a collection of around 110 GB of things for RISC OS.
And I still collect floppies, etc.

Nothing is really public yet, but I plan to provide something better than my current (and very incomplete) list of RISC OS 5 software.

riscos.xyz was originally reserved for this project.

It is easy to contact the owners of Arcade – if anyone is seriously bothered and has the time to put in. But like a lot else is it worth it?

I could too. At least for the static archive.
Not sure I could keep the telnet part (at first).
But it would be fun to host this part under RISC OS.

wait ages as it tries to show a lot of files. You can then choose individual files.

I have a little BASIC program that works out the path for wget after inputting the file number from the easier to browse textfile index. (copy included)
You will need a working wget setup, probably with the ca-bundle being available to it.
Could be a proof of concept for somebody to make something better.
You are asked first for the file number, then again for the expected filetype, and wget will set the filetype as it arrives.
Edit: Netsurf can’t do the above link so here is the wget method
wget 'https://docs.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1QlCCftSyrwjPMMUa6My3-5YcRmtxqKg5' -O ArcadeDL.zip
The CertData file is the same as ca-bundle so possibly the !Wget
application should have the Alias changed to
Set Alias$wget Run <Wget$Dir>.wget --ca-certificate=<InetDBase$Path>CertData %%*0
as the default so it works out of the box.

I was a very irregular caller for years, but started to get back into BBSing at the beginning of last year and called Arcade weekly, if not more. Suddenly, it stopped answering. I called, week after week, hoping that the cheery “ArcBinkley” answer would appear on the screen, followed by the log-on prompt. It never did. One day, I thought i’d listen to see what was happening so dialled out without “ATM”. Number unobtainable. That was sad – there can’t be much of a plan to get it back online (at least via dial-up), if the line rental has been cancelled.

So, I do have the sources, somewhere – though whether they are complete etc I don’t know. I now live in the US, and the last machine which had sources on (my A540 that ran The World of Cryton) is in Cambridge – and hasn’t been powered up for probably 15 years now.

I think I have disk images here. The BBS module didn’t do much – it was more a mutex for things like message database space allocation than anything else – but there are many moving parts. Plus, I think this was the second C program I ever wrote so it’s likely very ugly!

Is anyone in contact with either Dave? If the demon domain isn’t there now then I don’t have a way to contact them either. Hope they’re doing ok, it has been a while – they used to drive down to the wilds of somerset to visit and get me to add features for them :)

Demon has gone :(

Probably incomplete, but in case it’s useful: https://github.com/hfiennes/arcbbs

Comments from anyone brave enough to try and build it are appreciated!

Now that Hugo has arrived, we just need Steve Haslam (NetWay), Keith Hall (ArcBinkley) and Thomas Olsson (FidoMail) to come to this forum and we’ll have the Great Archimedes Fidonet Revival.

Still having my The Serial Port Dual Serial Card somewhere that helped connecting my A3000 to the Internet…

@Hugo: You are an occasion of sin for me.

I have got FAR too much on at the moment in the “real world”, and I have already taken on too many commitments to fit comfortably in my spare time (one RISC Os-y thing, and umpty other things that seemed like a good idea at the time).

And yet… I could go and buy the DDE, and get a new HDMI KVM switch so that I can use the rPi more easily, and then get ArcadeBBS working again.

It would be so much fun. I don’t need to sleep, do I?

Help me, someone.

Do you have a backup of the messagebase, etc then? I don’t remember old message pruning ever being part of the system, but it was a loooooong time ago! I’ve definitely still got Cryton’s files… at the moment trying to recover other bits of source from what I think was an arc-tar backup that is now on a sunos disk image that I just found.

I imaged these drives at least 20 years ago so struggling to remember how many russian dolls are nested within each other!

No, unfortunately. But I thought I’d seen mention on these forums that the messagebase exists in some form or other. May have been imagining that, though.

To be honest, I hadn’t thought of anything beyond squeeing over the code being available. ArcadeBBS was a significant backdrop to my angsty teenage years, and the idea that something – anything – of it could be salvaged in my twilight years is amazing.

Worst case, perhaps I could just get a skeleton of it up and running again. Or it could all end in tears. Anything’s possible.

Comments from anyone brave enough to try and build it are appreciated!

Oh brilliant. I’ll have a look at this the next time I’m at my computer. Probably this weekend?

Spent most of this evening installing a new car radio with reversing camera. Would have taken a lot less time if the instructions weren’t in barely-English and Russian, and had any resemblance to what was in front of me. Hell, the screenshots don’t even look alike and several of the ports are clearly mislabeled (unless the upper yellow RCA socket really is the antenna input (no, it isn’t!)).

Do you have a backup of the messagebase, etc then?

Yes, no, maybe.

I have some messagebase files, but they appear to be corrupted (long strings of nulls, bits of other files…).

There ought to be a way to create a new blank messagebase. Hopefully something in the source will indicate what may need to be done.

The BBS module didn’t do much

Hehe, I went the opposite direction. My server (unfinished, I’ve been on and off doing stuff to it for years!) has a telnet based LineTask per user, that basically reads marked up files, very basic scripts, and handles display of menus, message reading and entry, etc.
Everything else is delegated to the module. Adding a message? It’s the module. Listing messages? Module. User info? Module. The technical reference manual already runs to 57 pages!

Worst case, perhaps I could just get a skeleton of it up and running again.

I have a horrible feeling that I might do likewise if possible, just for the sake of it.

But for the proper dose of nostalgia… “I’ll Be There For You” (god, the Friends theme, is Friends that old?), No More ‘I Love You’s", “Common People”, “Wonderwall”, and… do I really need an excuse to dig up the “My So-Called Life” DVD set?

a telnet based LineTask

Telnet? [wanders off mumbling Yorkshiremen sketch]

MS declared Telnet a security risk, so they disabled the client in the defaults from W7 on.