rmiles7721

No DOS Doors

rmiles7721August 20, 2016BBS

For the time being I’ve pretty much given up on trying to get old DOS doors to run under Windows 10 64bit. I know with DOSBox and possibly Doorway it’s possible but I’ve been messing about for a couple of days and not made much progress. I may return to it later and switch gears. Possibly try qemu to get it working.

Still have a lot of configuration to do but am going out of town to Denver next Friday for an Ingress Anomaly so some of it may have to wait.

The games that are there are working fine, some are native Mystic games, some are actual 32 bit doors and the rest are running on either BBSLink or DoorParty.

 

BBS Updates

rmiles7721August 19, 2016BBSing

I’ve gotten some more finished on the menus and prompts. Still have a ton of stuff to do and not enough time of course.

I’ve also added a few new games. If anyone know where to find it I am attempting to locate the win32 version of LORD that was in testing a few years back so that I can have a local version. You used to be able to request it from Michael Preslar but unfortunately his web site (and the file request email) is down. Don’t know if that’s permanent or not.

Also looking for someone that’s half decent (or dare I say awesome) to design a main login screen. The old green one I did that I’ve had for years needs to go.

 

BBS Menus

rmiles7721August 16, 2016BBS

Menu Headers are finally finished the way I want them. I’m certainly no artist but like the way they turned out. Really it was just a matter of finding the font I wanted. I still have to “install” them in each menu where they aren’t showing yet and also change some of the commands (and the way they look.) I don’t like some of the commands as I don’t think they are needed. I also want to change the way some of them are worded as well. I should be able to get to some of that this afternoon after work.

menuhdr

Here’s a generic example of what the headers look like. I Originally tried to take the top header from my old menus and delete everything else and it just didn’t look right. After looking at some other board’s examples I dug around and found a font I like.

Migrated Users

rmiles7721August 12, 2016BBS

If you had an account on the old BBS and supplied an email address, your account has been migrated to the new setup. As I had to do each one by hand, it’s quite possible that I made mistakes so let me know if that’s the case and I’ll fix it. As long as you are able to log in you can also correct your details in your (A)ccount settings.

New Games

rmiles7721August 12, 2016BBS

Several new games online now.

doors

doorbbslink

Looking for a copy of Lord32 and will add it and several others as time permits.

You can access the board via telnet at telnet://bbs.shadowscope.com or from the site at this page

IFTTT Integration Coming to Apps (Already Live in Some)

rmiles7721August 11, 2016Home Automation

IFTTT has been working with developers over the last few months to directly add integration into apps so that you can unlock and potentially activate recipes from the apps rather than the web site or the IFTTT app itself.

Integrations with Abode, Awair, BloomSky, Foobot,Garageio, LIFX, Qapital, Roger, Skybell, and Stack Lighting are live today and Automatic, Emberlight, and Ring Video Doorbell are in development so should be live soon. Currently the only one I use is Automatic so that will be nice. All of the other home automation apps listed above pretty much require cloud support (as does Automatic) in order to link it up to your home automation system and while it’s a nice add-on, being dependent on something in the cloud to automate your home is a really bad idea IMHO.

More BBS Updates

rmiles7721August 11, 2016BBS

Rather than run a virtual machine I’ve kept my Mystic setup on my Win 10 64bit desktop just because it uses less resources that way. I was finding that my system was bogging down. Until I can get some of the other stuff offloaded to a Raspberry Pi I have Plex, Jackett, Sonarr and several other things running here at the same time.

That means that until I set up qemu the old 16-bit dos games won’t work except for the ones I have set up using BBSLink. I’ll try and get some of the newer 32 bit doors loaded as soon as possible. Currently the only one I am personally hosting is Usurper. There are at least ten accessible from the BBSLink menu though.

I have a few of my Ansi menus moved and will keep working on that slowly but surely. Going to do more back-end stuff first though. I need to set myself up as a point first so that I can access my netmail and all the echomail from my phone. I’ve never set up a point system before so that may take a while.

If you have any suggestions as far as games or mods please feel free to let me know.

Back Online

rmiles7721August 9, 2016BBS

Shadowscope BBS is back online and the move is complete (sort of lol.) The message networks have all been moved as have a large portion of the games. I will put my Ansi and menus back up over the next few weeks and doing some tweaking but the hard stuff is all finished. Now for the tedious…

No web interface currently like there was when I was using Synchronet but I’ll be able to pull some of the info off and make a partial interface eventually. Too many pans in the fire currently though.

BBS Status Update

rmiles7721August 5, 2016BBS

Door games are not currently working. My BBS laptop finally bit the dust so I have moved it to a VM on my main system and unfortunately something broke in the move. Getting this error in my Synchronet logs currently:

!JavaScript \sbbs\exec\load\http.js line 3: ReferenceError: require is not defined

Fuck if I know what that means lol but I’m trying to figure it out. Anyway, I am also in the process of setting it up using Mystic BBS as well. Message boards are still online. I’ll post another update once I figure it out.

 

Litestep is Still a Thing

rmiles7721July 6, 2016Technology

Wow. Who knew?

One of the very first posts of mine online from back in November ’99 was about Litestep, a replacement desktop shell for Windows that basically emulated a Linux desktop of the time. Apparently it’s still around. You can check out screenshots and download it at some of the links below. Talk about nostalgic. I may have to give it a spin.

http://www.litestep.net/

http://litestep-desktop.deviantart.com/