Arcade BBS down?

spend some time this weekend committing the changes

Diffing the code is probably the simplest way forward.

How many are left in the tub?

That would be telling.

a very successful and productive morning doing Functioning Adult things

Hmm, I’ve yet to figure out this Functional Adult thing. That generally seems to imply interacting with other people. I’ve not figured out people, like, at all.

How many are left in the tub?

Only the ones no one likes.

Hmm, I’ve yet to figure out this Functional Adult thing.

We’re all getting to the point in life where that means “still breathing”

Diffing the code is probably the simplest way forward.

Yes, although I would like to break things into logical chunks if I see logical chunks to break things into. Helps me to understand the code better, I find. If¹ I run out of patience, I’ll just do a big diff of what’s left and commit it with the description “Magic”.

¹ When

commit it with the description “Magic”.

Might I suggest “Magic for 32 bit compatibility” or something? So that in the future when this thread is long forgotten, you won’t look at it and think “huh?”.

;-)

Nice progress, and thanks for all the efforts here! Yeah, looking at the code it was all sorts of wrong. Amazing what a quarter of a century of fresh perspective does…

The crash in kill_slavetasks, did you have an address or dump to help narrow it down? Still debugging blind (have not had a chance to set up the Pi400 yet).

I did the !TelnetIn thing, though I didn’t spot the source with the other stuff. Will dig more this weekend.

(I will now eat a Tunnocks Teacake to celebrate. You can buy them in California, along with Branston pickle and Barber’s 1833 cheddar. It’s not all bad)

No luck finding !TelnetIn. It may possibly be somewhere on my A540 or RiscPC back in Cambridge; I’m booked to fly over there and may well be in post-travel quarantine for up to 10 days after I arrive, so that’ll be quality time to try and resurrect the boxes and re-image the drives.

(makes note to pack soldering iron, Saleae, and anything else I can think of)

I do plan to try and resurrect my old BBC B version of The World of Cryton. I still have the ST-506 HDD with the BBS & data on it, though that’s now coming up for 35 years old… hoping the low data density means it survived. I found a SASI controller on eBay for it, but worst case I’ll try and take the raw MFM datastream off it. 250kbit/s seemed fast at the time but now it’s trivial :)

I think you should resurrect The Serial Port too, as an interactive art project, with period products sold at the original prices by Acorn nerds, all of whom showing complete indifference to confused potential customers.

Guys – someone mentioned FidoMail? Thomas Olssen sent me the sources some years back, we took it over and made a lot of improvements (32-bit heap pointers, more than 256 areas etc) as well as some style guide tweaks.

The sources are on a 1.2GB hard drive which came out of my old RPC (with a dead motherboard due to battery leakage). The drive still worked at the last count, if anyone’s interested (and Thomas doesn’t object) I’ll plug it into a RPi with a USB-PATA converter and pull everything off, shove it in an archive and upload it somewhere.

Definitely interested in FidoMail, but only for historical reasons – I always used the hacked-by-Torsten-Karwoth-versions back in the 90s (1.96h IIRC).

Maybe someone could add an IMAP and NNTP backend to it :-)

We (myself and Miah Gregory) did do some work on being able to access it from other applications via WIMP messaging.

The last version we put out IIRC was 2.03. We’d incorporated all the “hacks” from Torsten’s versions and merged them back into the main source. Will have to dig out the disk and attempt a recovery.

No luck finding any telnet things, sadly. But, I do now have my old ST506 from my BBC BBS… applying power to it makes nasty noises which I hope are just the brake solenoid having failed meaning it’s trying to start with the brake applied. Bitsavers have the ST506 service manual online so at least I have somewhere to start on diagnosis…

Somewhere I have/had a 20MB Miniscribe SCSI drive that I tried using with the FileStore, sadly without success.
It made the most horrendous noises, and this was apparently normal!

Edit: Holy **** Me! How much? How much!? https://www.ebay.fr/itm/131678014679

especially the stuff that works best with our 60Hz refresh screen modes :)

Our ?

Once you get away from horrible things like televisions as monitors, your generic VGA and SVGA (etc) monitors run at 60Hz. Many of them support other refresh timings like 75Hz, but if the panel’s response time is 16ms, that’s basically going to be running at 60Hz internally.

Many modern monitors are much faster. Ardent gamers will notice ghosting, even at those speeds.

Neither my Pi3b nor my Mac Mini can manage more than 24 or 25Hz refresh rates at 4K resolution, so it’s lucky I was able to buy a relatively cheap television that handles those refresh rates.

Ghosting? What’s that?

Rhetorical question, before anyone answers it…

Hi, I’m a newcomer to RiscOS and my interest to get it running is to run VHost on it (and maybe some other BBS) – just to see what it was like back in the day!

I notice Hugo here (author of TelnetIn? I’m hoping). I have Vhost with Telnet in, and got it running, but unfortunately it keeps stopping. Sometimes it will run for 5 mins, sometimes for 5 hours but eventually it stops. I’d appreciate any help to try and debug that and fix it. Its version 0.05 (came with Vhost IIRC).

Is there a later version somewhere?

I had a dig and in all my various scattered .tar, .zip and .ddc files I can’t find any trace of the !TelnetIn source. Argh. Sorry.