One of the downsides of posting crime stories on top of the tech stuff is that some people (including Google apparently) count it as hate speech. I don’t know but it seems to make the site a target for getting hacked. It’s happened several times over the last few years, but I’ve gotten rather good at cleaning it up and restoring everything.
This last time (Sunday afternoon) I did a better job at securing everything. Only thing that concerns me now is that I am not so sure that my host, LivingDot, does such a wonderful job with securing their servers and that other sites hosted on the server where mine is might be prone to letting bad actors have access to their file systems.
Seriously considering moving this back to my own server at home. The only issue I ever had with that was bandwidth. The first few years I had my site online after I took my BBS down, I hosted it at my home, first under Apache on a Debian box then under IIS on a Windows 2000 server. I finally moved it to LivingDot sometime around 2005 because of DNS issues as well as the occasional bandwidth suck (remember the Slashdot effect?)
Those same issues are the ones that are holding me back from moving it inhouse right now. I am still on cable internet with Charter Spectrum and while my DL speeds are decent the UL sucks balls. We also do a lot of streaming and gaming (when my daughter is home from college) and that’s not conducive to running a web site on cable. I’m still hoping that someone will eventually offer fiber. It’s available a block from here and at least one company has fiber running 3 feet from my front yard.
As I am going through the older posts on here (and the ones that are still listed as private) I am slowly but surely trying to fix problems with formatting, grammar, missing information, and photographs. Each time I update a post, WordPress sends an email out like it was a new post. I’m not sure if there is any way to stop that but I apologize for the spam. Overall, it will make this place a little better.
I may even take out some of the foul language in a few of them. Don’t count on it though.
Seems like the only time I post at all the last couple of years is when I’ve updated the site.
I’ve temporarily changed from the comic based theme here to retrogeek. Not sure if I like this or not but as most of my stuff the last couple of years has to do with the BBS or Home Automation it fits.
Cleaned up the categories. While all of the crime categories are gone, the posts are still here and I am planning on leaving them. If you find that you have been mentioned in a post and want to request it be taken down shoot me a message using the support link above. I can guarantee that if you were convicted of murder, rape, child abuse, etc…you’re going to be here forever. The rest, however, I will consider on a case by case basis. If you come in here demanding it be taken down or threatening me, fuck you then. Use your manners.
I also got rid of the sidebar links. The majority of the blogs that I used to frequent have been gone for over a decade now and the couple that I still visit I have in my own bookmarks.
The power went out in the storms last night briefly. When it came back on apparently my mesh network didn’t start operating again. I was able to get out but apparently the BBS was unavailable. Didn’t realize that until this morning. I’ve reset it and everything should be good to go now.
Going to pin this post (if it lets me) so that folks can more easily find the links. You can access the BBS by using your telnet client and visiting telnet://bbs.shadowscope.com or telnet://shadowscope.noip.us
If you want an EASY way to get to it from your web browser you can access it from this blog (best accessed using a desktop browser, may not display properly on mobile browsers) or by going to http://shadowscope.noip.us/
Plenty of games (200+) both locally hosted and networked. Local and networked Message areas, news groups, awesome old-school Ansi featuring Luciano Ayres artwork and MORE. With a bent toward the supernatural and horror.
Due to the severe weather that’s supposed to move through this evening and into overnight I will be taking down the BBS and any other internal servers for the evening. Depending on when the storm moves through it may be tomorrow evening before I come back online (Have to leave for work around 6ish.)
The website here will stay up as the server is located across the country but the BBS, home automation server and media servers will be inaccessible.
The BBS and Mailer will be down for just a little bit while I make a backup and upgrade to the latest alpha version of Mystic A45. Shouldn’t take long as it’s just a straight xcopy to another PC where I sync everything to a dropbox folder.
Maskreet over at Throwbackbbs.com has this pretty good write-up that’s been up at least a couple of years. I needed it earlier this week and his site was temporarily down so I’ve decided to mirror it here. Everything below is courtesy of him:
Written by maskreet 12/3/2014 (updated 1/19/2018; newest DOSBox SVN)
First of all, if you don’t already have it, install Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 SP1. DOSBox requires this to run.
As of this writing, the latest stable release of DOSBox (v0.74) has a broken socket inheritance, so you’re going to be grabbing an SVN release. I used EmuCR from
but you can use whichever you like, as long as socket inheritance is fixed in that version.
(**NOTE** Most of the links to download that particular flavor and version are fake adware pushers, so here’s the real thing if you don’t want to take your chances: link)
Next you’ll be grabbing a Fossil driver. x00 or BNU will work, since they seem to be the easiest to load and use. I personally use BNU, but again, whichever you prefer. x00 v1.53 and BNU v1.70 are the last, stable releases. BNU can be found at http://pcmicro.com/bnu/, while x00 can be found with a Google search (local BNU file here, local X00 file here)
Now you’re going to need DoorWay to Unlimited Doors (hereafter called DoorWay). The latest version is on the pcmicro.com website, but doesn’t seem to have it listed on the main page. Either do a Google search for it, or head to http://pcmicro.com/doorway/download.html and download it from there. It’s shareware, so it’s limited to 10 minutes per use. I’d *highly* suggest registering (local DoorWay file here).
Now grab your games. I used http://www.myabandonware.com/ but any site that has them works. Keep in mind that you’re going to be limited to text and ANSI colors, and the games can’t be running in full-screen. A list of games I found that worked are:
Adventure! The Adventures of Alice Who Went Through the Looking-Glass and Came Back Though Not Much Changed A Mind Forever Voyaging Amulet of Yendor Ballyhoo James Bond 007 – Goldfinger James Bond 007 – A View to a Kill Brimstone Cyborg Deadline Enchanter Forbidden Castle Hack The Hermit’s Secret Infidel McMurphy’s Mansion Moonmist Nethack Leather Goddesses of Phobos Suspended Stephen King’s The Mist Trinity Voodoo Island The Wizard’s Castle Wishbringer Zork 1 Zork 2 Zork 3
This isn’t a complete list at all, just the ones I grabbed and ran.
Create a directory for whichever games you downloaded; I used C:\GAMES. Each game to its own directory inside the GAMES directory. Don’t worry about directory naming conventions (8 characters or less), since DOSBox will be mounting each game to its own root directory when fired up. Now create a directory named !U_GAMES in your GAMES directory.
Before getting too involved with the rest of this how-to, run each game to make sure it works. It HAS to be in a window, and can’t have anything other than text and ANSI graphics.
Create a directory somewhere on your hard drive for both DoorWay and DOSBox. I used C:\DOORWAY and C:\DOSBOX for mine. Also, create a directory in your DOORWAY directory named CFG. Uncompress them into their respective directories. Uncompress BNU into a temp directory, and just move BNU.COM over to your DoorWay directory.
Now, to the DOSBox config. I’m using Windows XP for my BBS, so DOSBox will create the default config file in:
C:\Documents and Settings\<account name>\Local Settings\Application Data\DOSBox\dosbox-SVN.conf
but you can see where it creates it on any version of Windows you run just by running DOSBox for the first time and looking at the DOSBox status window.
Once it’s created, head to that directory and open it up. Go through the entire config and turn off anything that you won’t be using. That includes all sound emulation, joystick, mouse, etc.
When you get near the bottom, you’ll see a section named [serial]. Make sure serial 2, 3 and 4 are set to disabled. for serial 1, set it like this:
serial1=nullmodem inhsocket:1 telnet:1
and close the config, saving your changes.
Easy so far, right?
Here we’re going to create the batch file. Create a new one in your DoorWay directory. I named mine DOOR.BAT, but you can name it whatever you like. Mine is a bit clunky, but it works. If you can polish yours to be more streamlined, go for it. If your setup so far is exactly like mine, you’ll need to put this in it:
@echo off
C: IF EXIST C:\games\!u_games\%4\%1\NUL GOTO EXISTS IF NOT EXIST c:\games\!u_games\%4\NUL GOTO NOUSERDIR IF NOT EXIST c:\games\!u_games\%4\%1\NUL GOTO NOGAMEDIR
:COMMAND c: cd\dosbox dosbox.exe -c “mount d c:\games\!u_games\%4\%1” -c “mount e c:\doorway” -c “mount f c:\mystic\temp%3” -c “e:” -c “bnu /f” -c “DOORWAY.EXE SYSF CFG\%1.cfg” -c “exit” -securemode -socket %2
REM %1 = config file / directory name REM %2 = socket REM %3 = node number REM %4 = user’s number
The batch first checks if each user’s custom directory exists based on their BBS user number. If it doesn’t, it creates it. It moves on to the next step, which is to see if the game they’re calling from the BBS exists in their user number directory. It creates that as well if it doesn’t exist, then xcopies the source game to their personal directory. Then it creates a custom CFG file in the CFG directory for DoorWay to use, based on the game name passed from the BBS menu. After that, it looks to see which game is being called, adds the last two CFG lines (which I’ll discuss a bit later), and finally starts DOSBox. DOSBox fires up, creates the mounted directories inside it, starts the Fossil driver, starts DoorWay, and runs the game. After quitting the game, either through user interaction, BBS disconnect or a 3 minute timeout, it passes control back to the BBS.
The DOSBox command line is:
-c
Tells DOSBox that you want to pass a command; preface any command you want with a -c and enclose in quotes
-c “mount d c:\games\!u_games\%4\%1”
Tells DOSBox to mount the user’s game directory as the D: drive in DOSBox
-c “mount e c:\doorway”
Tells DOSBox to mount the DoorWay directory as the E: drive in DOSBOx
-c “mount f c:\mystic\temp%3”
Tells DOSBox to mount Mystic’s temp<node> directory as the F: drive; needed by DoorWay for DOOR.SYS
-c “e:”
Changes to the DOSBox mounted E: directory
-c “bnu /f”
Loads BNU Fossil driver inside DOSBox with the default configuration
-c “DOORWAY.EXE SYSF CFG\%1.cfg”
Starts DoorWay with the custom config file in the CFG directory
-c “exit”
Passes an EXIT command to DOSBox (used as one of the ways to close DOSBox; /RB commandline parameter for DoorWay is another in the DoorWay config file)
-securemode
Tells DOSBox to not allow any additional setting or messing with the intial drive mountings in DOSBox
-socket %2
Tells DOSBox you want to pass the socket to it from the BBS; %2 is the batch files’ interpretation of the socket passed from the BBS command
The DoorWay commands are:
/CD
Goes to the game’s directory and runs it from there
/H:
Keeps the user from being able to shell to DOS (if possible in the game, which I haven’t seen but you can’t be too careful)
/D:
Keeps the user from being able to write to the system (not really needed, was using this in an older setup that wasn’t sandboxed in DOSBox; also keeps the user from being able to save their games, which defeats the purpose of the whole thing)
/G:ON
ANSI graphics mode. Seems to work without this.
/O:T
Skips the default “DOORWAY TO UNLIMITED DOORS” full screen loading message
/S:f:\
Points DoorWay to where your BBS DOOR.SYS is located; in the DOSBox command line, this will be drive F:
/V:D
Direct video writes
/K:180
Keyboard timeout in seconds; change to whatever you like
/RB
Reboot after exit of DoorWay; some games need this to exit properly. Won’t reboot your system, only closes DOSBox
The four lines in your Adventure! example are:
:ADVENT
The target label called by “if %1==ADVENT GOTO ADVENT” earlier in the batch file. HAS TO MATCH THE SOURCE GAME DIRECTORY!
/P:d:\<game executable>
/P: is the command that tells DoorWay what needs to be run when invoked. d:\<game executable> is the name of the game that it runs. IT MUST BE A .COM OR .EXE FILE! Batch files won’t work with this setup.
/B:M
/B: deals with the bottom line of the game. M will move the characters to the line above (line 24). Some games can be configged to whichever amount of lines you like, which means you’d be able to remove this from that particular game. Others don’t and require it. It’s up to you to figure out which is needed.
GOTO COMMAND
Tells the batch file to go to the COMMAND label and run DOSBox.
Now that that’s all setup, we’ll be creating the Mystic menu commands to run the games.
I have mine setup where going to the DOORS menu from the MAIN menu gives a listing of games in categories. I have one for InterBBS games, one for card games, one for single-player games, one for these DOS games, etc. It doesn’t really matter where they’re accessible, just that they’re accessible. No fun playing them by yourself, right? =)
Create a new menu for your game. Configure it however you like when presented to the user. For the commands, basic setup looks like this:
Command
Access
Data
(GD) Display a file
s50
c:\games\advent\help_advent.txt (OPTIONAL – create and display if the game has something that the user might need to know)
(NA) Set node action
s50
Playing Adventure! (OPTIONAL – sets the Who’s Online listing with what they’re doing)
(DG) Exec door
s50
c:\doorway\door.bat ADVENT %0 %3 %# (The text after door.bat MUST have those four commands in that exact order!)
(GT) Display a line of text s50
s50
|CR|CR|PA (OPTIONAL – two carriage returns, pauses after the game quits back to the BBS)
The help text files should look similar to this:
|CL Use the spacebar to advance past the PAUSE prompts in game |PA
For the DG command:
It creates a DOOR.SYS file that DoorWay needs to read to set time limits and ANSI settings (time limits only in registered version, otherwise 10 minute limit each time)
ADVENT is the name of the game. IT HAS TO MATCH THE NAME OF THE BASE GAME DIRECTORY YOU CREATE AND GOTO LABEL IN THE DOOR.BAT FILE! Make sure all three are the EXACT same, or it won’t work.
%0 is the socket handle that’s passed to DOSBox
%3 is the node the user is currently on; used to tell DOSBox where to mount one of the drives for the DOOR.SYS file to be read by DoorWay
%# is the user number, used to create the user directory and/or pass the info to DOSBox to mount one of the drives.
Now that everything’s setup, test it out. If it works, great! The easiest way to create new menu entries is to copy/paste and edit a couple relevant things. Be sure each menu entry command has the directory and NAME changed to whichever game it is; everything else on the DG command line can and should be left the same.
If it doesn’t work, then make sure the game name as your game directory, labels in the DOOR.BAT file and menu command are all the same. Also, look for any typos anywhere.
Any comments or questions can be directed at sysop@throwbackbbs.com, or in an email on the BBS.
Added a bunch of lit packs today as well as several hundred old BBS mods and art packs. Still need to separate the art packs into different sections at some point. Also have added email validation. Expect that the next time you log in. If you don’t have a valid email address, update it from the personal settings menu or shoot me a message and I will do it.