Arcade BBS down?

@ Rick

Have you tried it through the ArchiEmu Debugger?

Okay, the thing hanging up the machine was the fido_setup routine, so I’ve just commented it out in the main() function (in server), and set all of the linetasks to "" (in the !Config file).

This allows the server to put an icon on the iconbar. If you get that far, you’re lucky. Something is writing two &FFFFFFFF words to essentially random locations in the RMA, with the expected results. Let’s just say that I’ve not prodded the reset button (or run DiscKnight) this much in a long time.

I think we’d better stop until the database formats are figured out. It’s possible that the module is completely misinterpreting something. Unfortunately I don’t think my data is valid (plus it’s for 1.64b32, is it even in the same format?). Well, whatever, I’ll try it… What’s another crash? ;-)

Right then. The big difference here is that this version of ARCbbs appears to have the files Mail.Data.DataMap, Mail.Data.Info, and Mail.Data.LookupMap. These aren’t present in my old server, nor does the module (0.56 17 Dec 1994) make any reference to these files.

If the files are missing, the module fails to initialise with the error “The area of memory reserved for relocatable modules is full”!
If the files are present, the machine stiffs. Probably something to do with these files and the other files not matching. ;-)

Ah… It might be a pre-1.64 thing. I’ve dug up an old copy of the ARCbbs demo, and that has all of these files, so I’ll copy them in and try running the server, see if it blows up again…

Let’s just say that I’ve not prodded the reset button (or run DiscKnight) this much in a long time.

Just sitting here surprised that you aren’t starting off by running it in a RPCEmu install…

Yeah, it’s not a recent ARM being emulated, but then you’re not playing with code from this century either.

Just sitting here surprised that you aren’t starting off by running it in a RPCEmu install…

That would mean firing up the PC…

The data files from the demo “mostly helped”. I can get as far as this now:

It is still as buggy as hell and prone to crashing everything in sight (it takes out Filer in a heartbeat), but it may have something to do with the data files used now being too old and messing something up differently (although user information and messages appear to work in the BBS).
Why do I think this? Well… um…

Still, I can now get the server up provided I prod it gently… like nitroglycerin. ;-)

Still, I can now get the server up provided I prod it gently… like nitroglycerin. ;-)

Or, the olde school plaything = NI₃ but NCl₃ is something you can make out of commoner materials, if you know. :)

but NCl3 is something you can make out of commoner materials, if you know.

If I recall my school chemistry lessons correctly, that was a brownish liquid that had a tendency to explode if you looked at it in a funny way. A bit on the dangerous side for a “school plaything”.

If I recall my school chemistry lessons correctly, that was a brownish liquid that had a tendency to explode if you looked at it in a funny way.

Gee, and there I thought that was just the Thursday curry, where leftovers from earlier in the week were ground up and plastered in a sauce that no Indian on the planet would recognise ¹, slopped over rice overboiled to the point of culinary carnage…

[yes, I skipped rather a few meals at school, to the point where matron would interrogate me frequently because anorexia… but no, I had no problem with my favourite tipple (Mars bars), I just thought many of the so-called meals were unfit for the piggy bin, never mind human consumption]

¹ The first rule about the onion bhajis is do not ask what the onion bhajis are made of. It’s neither onion nor bhajis, but possibly pieces of rodent from the cellar mixed with leek and whatever was in that can of beans that was opened last week.

If I recall my school chemistry lessons correctly, that was a brownish liquid that had a tendency to explode if you looked at it in a funny way. A bit on the dangerous side for a “school plaything”.

1. The “school plaything” was the tri-iodide – paint the solution on a surface, and it detonates easily when dry. A smear on the blackboard for example.
2. The tri-chloride does indeed have a tendency to, er, change status if you poke it, shine a light on it, or bring it into contact with organic material.¹ Chemically all you need is in a common or garden dry cell battery.

Getting back to the school plaything reminds me that I did promise the headmaster and his friend in the senior police uniform that I would never tell people how to make these things. Apparently “never” is an indefinitely long time.

NB. The iodide would be brownish, the chloride yellowish.

¹ I don’t think “looking at it in a funny way” is listed as a trigger.

The first rule about the onion bhajis is do not ask what the onion bhajis are made of. It’s neither onion nor bhajis, but possibly pieces of rodent from the cellar mixed with leek and whatever was in that can of beans that was opened last week.

Having seen the collected material at the bottom of a PUVA treatment cabinet¹ I think I could offer a suggestion.

¹ If you can’t find a web reference for that I will give a description, maybe even a description of the collected material.

Here are the Rick’s Notes:

Rick's notes:

The manual way to build:

  Set the directory with !ARCserver and the source as the current directory.

  Create "o" directory if it doesn't exist.

  Open a TaskWindow.

    amu -f makebbs                  <-- make linetask
    amu -f make.makeserv            <-- make server (iconbar thing)
    makemod                         <-- make support module
    makedoor                        <-- make door module
    makepipe                        <-- make pipe module (does anything use this?)
    linkb                           <-- make batch uploader
    linku                           <-- make local upload tool

  makebbs must be done before makeserv, as makeserv depends upon things.

  If you want debug builds, you can use "makebbsd" and/or "make.makeservd"
  (delete the files in the 'o' directory and rebuild all).

  You should manually set the type (&FF8 for normal application, or &FD3
  for debug application) for what you want to debug. Note that you can't
  invoke a debugged linetask from a debugged server. One at a time!


The quick way to build:
  
  Double-click on the BuildAll file.

  A full build takes about 25 seconds on an ARMv7 Pi2 at 900MHz.
  

This builds with DDE29 (I haven't installed DDE30 yet), and it is
assumed that the tools have been 'seen' so calling amu, cc, and
link work as expected, and that references to the libraries work.



makearc / makesm (!SparkMail) does not work, it requires a "utils" library
that was placed within CLib:o - I think this is for the dirscan() function.

makelocald (!LocalDL) does not work, !LocalDL directory and Templates
not present.



Assume the assembler files have been translated to 32 bit if it says so
in the header.

As for the C source, search for "##RICK##" to see what I have modified.


!ArcServer.Mail.WorkingData and !ArcServer.User.WorkingData are message
and user data files believed to be mostly working. They have been taken
from the ARCbbs demo (version 1.26!) with indexes etc recreated using
the sysop tools.
You should copy this data into the "Data" directories to reset what is
in there, should you need to.
There are a few messages (two private mail, and one public IIRC),
several default message areas, and one user called PROSPECTIVE SYSOP
who has no password. If you don't want to type that, log in by user
number, just enter '1' when it asks for the user name to log in.


The local logon redraw is broken. The sprite is drawn the wrong height
and it doesn't redraw the right parts. This is because it was intended
for 2:4 aspect displays (think MODE 12). Drag a menu or something over
the window to get it to refresh.


FIDO SUPPORT IS DISABLED. It crashes somewhere, so since there's no
Fido mailer, it was just as easy to disable the function call that
starts up the Fido stuff.


There is still duff data somewhere (in the data files?) which means
junk (often &FFFF FFFF 00) gets spewed to random places in system
memory. This has the obvious effect.

So don't run this on a live system without having backups AND a copy
of DiscKnight to ensure nothing got broken along the way.


Whee! My first "FileCore in use" error since forever.
Wait... that's a bad thing, right? ;-)


It will work. Just. Maybe. If the wind is blowing in the right
direction.
But it will most likely crash on shutdown.


As Arcade has run ARCbbs for decades, and I ran in (both 1.63 and
various versions of 1.64) for a few years, can we assume that it
ought to work given valid data?
If so, perhaps the next stage should be to figure out what the data
format *ought* to be, and make sure it is all correct.
Sadly, the "system file creator" is missing.


Rick 2021/03/06

And here’s an archive:

https://heyrick.eu/blog/files/arcbbs20210306.zip (941K)

I don’t think “looking at it in a funny way” is listed as a trigger.

Probably is for modern snowflakes. Things having “trigger warnings” is a trigger for me. Didn’t these people get brought up with Grimm’s tales and a dose of reality (shit happens then you die)?

the collected material at the bottom of a PUVA treatment cabinet

Once upon a time I knew a person with psoriasis. I can imagine. But I don’t want to…

Thanks Rick, that’s nifty.

The little bit of free time I anticipated having this weekend has now been consumed by other urgent obligations, but I’ve done a wee bit of work in my own Fortress of Solitude.

With frequent peeks at your last zipfile, I have also managed to get makebbs to compile. I haven’t done anything to the asm yet, because after spending half an hour looking at it, I realised that I really don’t remember any ARM assembler (and I never really knew a lot to begin with). So I expect that it will explode as soon as it is run – so I won’t do that yet. Rather than working out how to convert 26-bit asm to 32-bit, it would probably make a lot more sense for me to just copy over your changes wholesale, and start (re-)learning from that point.

I will, at some point, clone Hugo’s repo and upload my changes to GitHub, broken down into some sort of order – to satisfy my own obsessive-compulsive tendencies if nothing else. If you don’t mind, I’d like to incorporate your changes too (attributed, of course). However, this will require me to commit changes to cvs or svn on the RISC OS machine, punt them over to one of my linux instances, convert them to git, and push them to the repo. I won’t have time to do any of the setup for that this weekend.

I’ve been told that 50 is the new 30. On balance, I think I was happier when I was 30. I certainly had more free time and energy…

I can imagine. But I don’t want to…

I’m not that fond of crisps (potato chips for US readers)

Nice Rick! I need to work out how to send you a beer (or possibly something stronger given that you’ve been looking at my code)!

I found !LocalDL on my old BBS disk image, and have added it to git. For dirscan()…. huh. I looked in Clib elsewhere in my disk images and there’s no “utils” library, and a binary grep finds no trace of “dirscan” in any files. I have very very faint memories of it being something I found in my ANSI C reference guide, but it’s also possible – as google finds absolutely nothing – that I imagined this. Wouldn’t be terribly hard to re-create a directory scan function though I guess.

As I remember the pipe stuff was for BBS plugins. There was a doc in the git about this, I think?

IBM PC style ANSI 8 bit is supported, yes, though obviously would be nice to get the redraw happy – I can certainly believe that something isn’t redrawing the sprite right; I did this all properly from scratch for !ANTTerm but that was both for Atomwide and also a totally different development so don’t think I could easily move it across. May be easier for me to try and fix things if I can get the same system up on a Pi (I got a Pi400 recently). So… how do I get the build environment up (eg 32 bit RISC OS environment, DDE, etc) ?

I’ve poked around and can’t see anything that creates a blank mail database. I do remember that the “Map” files are free space bitmaps (which can be recreated with the sysop utils), but that generally it could start with blank files – as are in the !ARCserver.Mail.Data directory.

Have you tried an entire messagebase export and then re-import using the sysop utils? That might be a good way to try and re-create a known-good messagebase format.

I need to work out how to send you a beer (or possibly something stronger given that you’ve been looking at my code)

He doesn’t get on with alcohol (I think I’m using his ration) so it’s best to figure out how to ship a large amount of English tea (hard to get decent stuff in France)

UK Bakebeans – Steak and Kidney pies – a large food parcel snuggled into France :-)

I’m glad a bought two 1100 bags of Tetley ¹ in December (https://youtu.be/thGTB5iWJQ8). I paid €26,95 ² per sack in December (free Prime delivery). Fast forward a couple of weeks to Brexit actually happening, it’s €49,00 a sack. https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B007IJ00TC/

¹ Sadly Tetley sells export tea, so no supermarket will ever stock British style Tetley as they won’t understand the difference. Generally British tea is fine ground and goes into boiling water for about 30-60 seconds for a decent cuppa. French tea is much rougher ground (like their sausages!) which means you’re looking at 3-5 minutes at least. Couple that with a weird habit of serving black tea in water that’s barely above tepid (seriously, there are kettles that turn off at 60°C for black tea!) and you’re looking at an entirely unsatisfactory cup of tea. A special mention to Lipton Yellow Label, the most godforsaken drivel ever to call itself tea. Mom liked it (heartburn issues). After she died, I did a test. 25 seconds Tetley versus five minutes and three bags of Yellow Label. Guess which one I tipped down the drain as undrinkably weak?

² The price might sound horrific to a Brit (don’t these bags retail for about six quid?) but given that typical prices for French tea is around €2-3 for a box of 20-25 bags (going up to €6 for a specialty Earl Grey), if we just work on a value of €2,50 for 22 bags (a middle ground), that would put 1100 bags at €125 in French prices. Plus, with Prime delivery I don’t get screwed for delivery. You should take a look at Fray Bentos pies on French Amazon. They’re like €6-8 each with €15-20 in postage. I don’t like kidney, there’s only one Just Chicken on offer… https://www.amazon.fr/dp/B00CIBACG6/

A regular annoyance in Austria is ordering a black tea, and getting a pot of warm water and a separate tea bag, thus allowing the water to cool down even more before meeting the tea bag. I’d drink coffee instead, but it is difficult to get decaff there, and caffeinated coffee gives me migraines. (Tea doesn’t, nor does Coke. Why?)

A pleasant surprise when skiing in Canada last year was the ability to get a halfway decent pot of English Breakfast.

Tetley’s tea is the only teabag variety I buy, but I really prefer green tea (water at 83°C precisely). There is a tea shop in Norwich which sells some absolutely delicious varieties, including “flowers” of tea – whole tips tightly scrunched into balls, which uncurl in hot water. I’ve got a glass teapot for the purpose of watching them blossom.

When I go to France, I drink coffee – because their idea of tea is just Wrong.

Generally British tea is fine ground and goes into boiling water for about 30-60 seconds for a decent cuppa

Feel the ground tremble? No, not an earthquake. It’s the population of Yorkshire fainting in unison. I’m told by those I know of that religion if the spoon doesn’t stand of its own volition, it’s not tea.

if the spoon doesn’t stand of its own volition, it’s not tea

This is also true of transport caffs.

I will, at some point, clone Hugo’s repo and upload my changes to GitHub,

Ah, yes. GitHub. That doesn’t play nice with RISC OS filetypes, that requires a pile of other machines in order to get it to work, that…

It’s why I provided a zip file. So much simpler. Okay, so it doesn’t scale, but right now there’s just the two of us working with this code.

broken down into some sort of order – to satisfy my own obsessive-compulsive tendencies if nothing else.

Yeah, about that. I wanted to put everything into its own self-contained app that can be easily built by using Sh^C from Zap, but unfortunately there is a lot of code sharing. That’s why you must build the LineTask before the Server – the Server’s MakeFile doesn’t build everything, it depends upon stuff previously built.
It’s not insurmountable, but I think at this time it’s probably better to try to work out what’s the root cause of the memory corruption before messing with the build process.

If you don’t mind, I’d like to incorporate your changes too (attributed, of course).

Sure.

However, this will require me to [snip complicated stuff]

Doesn’t the RISC OS Git client work?

I’ve been told that 50 is the new 30.

I’m nearly 50. Sure as hell don’t feel like I felt when I was 30. Very disturbed sleep (no idea why, I’m not stressed out or worried by any particular thing) leaves me feeling perma-tired.

On balance, I think I was happier when I was 30. I certainly had more free time and energy…

Yes, and yes.
There’s also the problem that as you get older, time speeds up. As a child, days used to be long and summers used to go on forever. Now? FFS, it’s already March. Not that I’m unset about having most of winter behind me, but… FFS, it’s already 2021. Or the 372nd of March 2020!

I might as well start digging my grave now. The way time is speeding up….. :-(

I have always felt that some things are better in BBS form than there clunky modern equilivents that use HTTP and render in HTML.

The problems with BBS form is generally the lack of searchability (it’s a very clunky interface, those services that do provide a search), and the editing often being line-based rather than document based. Some offer full screen editors, with varying degrees of capability (I came across one that wrapped onto a new line, to save having to work out reflowing the rest of the text).

Forum style boards being one example of such things (like the one we are on here),

There’s nothing wrong with an HTML forum when it is designed to be simple and efficient. It’s probably a good thing that Beast is a dead simple forum. While it is lacking a lot of features, it also doesn’t include hundreds of unnecessary bits of script and is functional on fairly basic browsers (like NetSurf!).
More than can be said for GitLab. ;-)

where there is something better about the simple text layout on a Terminal Emulator connected to a BBS.

What I like is the fact that a BBS is an enclave sectioned off from “the internet”. You need to log in (even if as Guest) and you need to choose what to see. It is essentially a zone free from the tentacles of Google and Facebook (etc).

That’s one of the reasons that I started to write my own. It exists in “the dark web” (which is usually a negative term, but if you can translate it to a more literal meaning of “off the beaten track” then it makes sense).

From what has been said here I would guess it safe to assume that Extend ASCII terminal mode is supported?

I presume by “Extend ASCII terminal” you mean an eight bit character set based upon CP-437 with ECMA-48 SGR codes?
If so…everybody just says “ANSI”. It’s simpler. ;-)

(even though ANSI had withdrawn support in favour of referring to the ISO standard, but then many of us grew up with MS-DOS and ANSI.SYS, so world+kitten calls it an “ANSI” terminal anyway).

Are there any other Telnet BBSs up and running, with RISC OS as the subject?

Not that I’m aware of. It was pretty much Arcade. But, on the other hand, there were only a handful of people that still used to log in. Typing at an 80×24 terminal is so very old school.

Using telnet and traditional terminal emulation protocals you do not have to worry about the availability of a good enough Web Browser,

No, instead you have to worry about whether or not the firewall is willing to pass telnet connections. Several public APs don’t.

nor do you have to worry about the layout looking different do to the rendering engine used,

There’s no issue with the ROOL forum, it renders fine on NetSurf. It’d give it a try on WebsterXL just for the sake of testing it, but I don’t have Webster source code to fix it up for whatever it doesn’t like about the most recent build of SecureSockets (or, better, to use AcornSSL).

And now days any of the traditional Terminal Emulation protocals is likely available on any system without any issues.

Yes, no, maybe. On iOS when I looked (when iOS7 was current), there was no free terminal emulator that supported either the ANSI character set, or colour codes.
On Android, there’s varying incarnations of “Connectbot” (I use VX Connectbot) that does do colour and can even sort of manage the character set if you find the right incantation in the setup (set the encoding to “CP437”). But it often redraws a mess, like it’s dropping characters or they’re not fixed width. I don’t know…

ARCbbs, being old, supports a choice of basic text terminal, VT52, VT100, or ANSI. My server, being recent, only supports ANSI, but it does have a built in function where it will try to swap out the extended characters of PC437 with ISO 8859/1 where it can. This was added in order to support mobile devices that might not have (or have broken) support for the extended characters.

(or possibly something stronger given that you’ve been looking at my code)!

The most jarring thing is the K&R. I started with C a little later than you, so my only experience of that style of code is that book that every C programmer owns. ;-)

I found !LocalDL on my old BBS disk image, and have added it to git.

Must remember to pick that up.

For dirscan()…. huh. I looked in Clib elsewhere in my disk images and there’s no “utils” library, and a binary grep finds no trace of “dirscan” in any files.

It is referenced in the arcscan/SparkMail build process as having been in the same place as Stubs (CLib.o).

I have very very faint memories of it being something I found in my ANSI C reference guide,

Could be, it would make sense if you had a generic library of useful things to put it there, I guess.

though obviously would be nice to get the redraw happy – I can certainly believe that something isn’t redrawing the sprite right;

Shouldn’t be hard. It’s a redraw function sort of in the middle of the terminal source (and checking elsewhere for where it might request a bit of the window be redrawn. The only impediment is that I know zip about RISC_OSLib. :-/

Looks like you’re using a scaled sprite plot, so shouldn’t be too hard to plug in the correct scaling and see about putting it in the right place? It’s just the redraw, it looks fine when saving the sprite.

[I am not doing it right now, I’m sitting outside in the sunshine, writing this on the tablet using my phone as an access point, and listening to PPN Radio via 4G and a Bluetooth speaker – it’s such a shame this sort of kit didn’t exist when I was younger… we had to make do with a Walkman!]

May be easier for me to try and fix things if I can get the same system up on a Pi (I got a Pi400 recently). So… how do I get the build environment up (eg 32 bit RISC OS environment, DDE, etc) ?

Okay, for RISC OS, get yourself a copy of RISC OS Direct. It’s a disc image to put onto SD card. It comes with all sorts of software bundled.
https://www.riscosdev.com/direct/

As for the DDE, that’s (still) a commercial product. It has just recently been updated. https://www.riscosopen.org/content/sales/dde

Have you tried an entire messagebase export and then re-import using the sysop utils? That might be a good way to try and re-create a known-good messagebase format.

Now, there’s an idea. Why didn’t I think of that?!

in Canada last year was the ability to get a halfway decent pot of English Breakfast.

Their titular head of state is ‘er Maj. So you’ve think they’d have some experience with tea… ;-)

There is a tea shop in Norwich which sells some absolutely delicious varieties, including “flowers” of tea

Ah, yes. I had some of those of the Sweet Sakura variety (Japanese). I’ve yet to be convinced it’s anything other than hot water (the taste much be so subtle as to be undetectable), but like you note, it’s worth it just to watch the blosssom.

When I go to France, I drink coffee – because their idea of tea is just Wrong.

I think maybe the further away you get from the UK, the more wrong it gets. You don’t want to know what the Spanish do when you ask for “té con leche”.

It’s the population of Yorkshire fainting in unison.

:-) I’m not against stronger tea, I’m just impatient. If the tea, with milk, is able to be mistaken for coffee, then it’s “strong enough”.

Unfortunately, most French black teas, after minutes, you can still see the bottom of the cup (note – cup, not mug). Add milk, the water goes white, not any shade of brown.

All you up in Yorkshire, the only way to deal with that sort of shock is to go put the kettle on. Which is exactly what I’m going to go do right n…….

put the kettle on. Which is exactly what I’m going to go do right n……

Was that putting the kettle on taking out all the village’s electricity? ;-)