My BBS has been very sluggish on the old PII450. I find some people give up waiting for the BBS to start after connecting. Tonight I moved the BBS onto my old desktop computer (P4 1.5 GHz), the one that couldn't run Vista because none of its hardware is supported. I formatted the computer and put XP Home on it, then simply copied the BBS over. The bbs is running much faster now. The problem I have is the old Runtime Error 200 for door games written in Turbo Pascal is back. There is some timing feature built into TP7 that loops x times for something? On faster computers (such as PII233) this did not work and caused a divide by zero error (RTE 200). I've been running a TSR program that fixes the bug on the fly while TP7 programs are executing. It works great on my old PII450 but I guess my 1.5 GHz machine is again too fast, so the error is back. I don't know what to do now. Some of my favorite doors on the BBS such as EZ-ROM, Planets TEOS and Super Liners no longer work. I've posted a message on the BBS_DOORS and MUFFIN (maximus bbs) echos on FidoNet. Hopefully someone knows what to do. All I can find on google are patches and the TSR which only work on older PII computers.

Lately I've been thinking about my BBS again. When I log in, I always do it from my Windows computer because the linux telnet program does a crappy job rendering some ANSI screens, and the character encoding is all wrong.

Today I have found a solution. It's not 100% perfect, but close. My favorite terminal program in DOS was Telix. Minicom is a linux clone of Telix, and like Telix it can only use a modem. Combine minicom with modemu, a modem emulator, and you have an awesome terminal for BBSing. After installing the minicom and modemu packages, run the following command line to start up the emulator and attach it to minicom:

modemu -c "minicom -o -l -c on -p %s"

I put that in a script because I don't expect to remember it. After it is started, change your console window's character encoding to IBM850 so that you get almost perfect IBM extended ASCII. If you do it before you load minicom, it seems to reset to the default character encoding when minicom is started. The only problems I have found are:

• IBM850 isn't quite what I wanted, CP437 is what I want but I can't seem to get a font that works right. Some character's are a bit wrong, and there is a tiny gap between some lines.
• ZModem doesn't seem to work. Maybe I need to install an other package?
• I don't know how to change my default console font and character encoding so when I switch to a full screen 80x25 console it uses the right font. For a true BBS experience, you need to be using 80x25 full screen text mode.

Pretty dam close to perfect though. It even has a phone book so you can program in all your favourite BBS's. I called almost every bbs on one list that uses the Maximus software that I use. I was so shocked, almost all of them use the default screens, default everything. They mostly have no files, very few and inactive message areas, and are just crap in my opinion. After seeing those boards I think my BBS is a real winner :) I think the login sequence flows better, professionally designed menus (an ANSI artist did them for me), file areas with files, hundreds of FidoNet message bases, dozens of door games, and a relatively active user base (1-2 calls a day, amazing for 2007).

Update: I've since learned about a program called SyncTERM. This is an amazing little program that knows all about IBM extended ASCII, ZModem, and does magic to give a 100% authentic BBS experience without having to install fonts, change your console window's character encoding, or anything. It just works! Unless you use Ubuntu. Ubuntu has some missing symlinks to libraries that the program needs to enable the correct rendering of extended ASCII. Install the libsdl-console-dev package and its dependencies and the symlinks will be created for you. I love SyncTERM, I will use it for BBSing instead of minicom. It even does perfect full screen after pressing ALT+ENTER!

In other news, I just got an email about the JavaOne conference. There's a Canadian night where registered Canadian attendees can meet up. Guess who's Canadian? James Gosling, the original Creator of Java. Guess who's going to be at Canadian night meeting and chatting with attendees? James Gosling! I have mixed feelings about this. One part of me is so excited about getting to meet him. The other part of me knows that I have nothing intelligent to say or talk about with him, and that he is on a whole other level of intelligence than most of us. I've only been doing Java for a bit over a year :/

Oh crap!! It's from 6:30 - 9:30 PM, and one of the seminars I was really looking forward starts at 9:00 PM, and there are also a couple more before it that I really wanted. Well, meeting other people at the conference (and especially James Gosling) will probably be good for me since I am travelling alone and don't know anyone. I might be able to build up some good contacts for the future. I think I'll attend Canadian Night, and will leave a bit early so I can catch the 9:00 PM seminar.

I've noticed a few weird things lately on the BBS computer, which is also a "temporary" place for my websites. Last week the database server service stopped running by itself and I had to start it back up manually. Also I noticed bbs users connecting and waiting so long for the bbs to start up that they give up and disconnect.

I suspect the hard drive is starting to fail, or some of the old memory I stuffed in months ago is cheap and going bad. I backed up all the important files and if the computer goes bad it might be a little while before I get things back up and running.

I have put off a re-write of my website for years. A large part of that was because I wanted to do it in Java, had some experience in it but not enough to do the rewrite to the level of sophistication and quality that I wanted. I've been gaining a lot of experience at work and might actually get started on the rewrite soon (as in first quarter of 2007 :)

A week ago I noticed that when I switched my KVM to the bbs computer there was no video and the keyboard lights seemed to be frozen. I rebooted it but still nothing. I left it for a while and tonight finally got around to investigating the problem. My first thought was the video card had finally died. It is a Matrox Marvel G200-TV that I bought with the computer back in 1999. It has an external TV tuner and IO ports for video editing. I felt really guilty for using such a cool video card in my old BBS but I just don't do video editing, and the 8MB card is no match for my 64 or 128 mb card in my current computer. Anyway.. I went to my large junk pile of computer parts in the basement and found an ATI Rage II+ DVD video card. Plugged it in, still nothing. However this time I heard one long beep and 3 short beeps. I went on the internet and it took a while to find the beep code guide for the BIOS on the motherboard.. but I found it. It told me that there is a problem with the memory. I took one stick of memory out and the machine booted! That's the second time that computer has had bad memory, but it is also 7 years old. I went back down to my computer junk collection and found three 32 MB sticks. It doesn't add up to the 128 MB it is replacing but close. I stuck all three in the computer and put the old video card back in. Turns out the video card doesn't work anymore either. Again I swapped the video card, closed it up and put the BBS back into operation. In a way I'm glad that video card died because I no longer feel guilty about using it in my BBS machine. However it will probably go into my computer junk collection because I'm not 100% certain the card doesn't work :)

That junk pile was twice as big earlier this year. I went through it and threw out anything pre-PCI, pre-SDRAM, pre-100mbit ethernet, etc.. I'm still left with quite a bit of stuff but it has proven to be useful many times such as tonight. I used 3 sticks of ram and a video card. I've also got lots of cables that come in handy.

I hope I didn't lose my regulars :( I used to get 1-3 calls per day. I'd say there are maybe up to 5 regulars, and random people on the net seem to find my bbs every couple days. Right now I'm doing a backup because the last backup I made is over a year old. When I get my network re-arranged (another blog post one day) it will be backed up regularly.

Warning: This blog entry is highly geeky and non-computer nerds will find it boring.

I check on my bbs a few times a week to make sure it's still up and running. I'm surprised that it has regular callers. I checked a telnet bbs list (which says it verifies that each bbs is still running every 30 and 60 days). There are 457 active telnet bbs's listed on their list. There are other lists out there. Amazing! I remember when the monthly bbs lists for your local area would become available. I was always so eager to try out a new local bbs.

This reminds me a bit of my first days using the Internet and websites back in 1994. There weren't that many search engines out there and the ones that did exist weren't that great. Back then I didn't fully understand everything anyway (I was 12). We had a thick "phone book" but for websites. There seemed to be so few they could be listed in a 2" thick book! Before we got that book, I thought the only sites on the intenet were the handful that I had visited. Any time I heard about a new website to check out it was an exciting thing, like finding out about a new local bbs. My first browser was Spry Mosaic 1.0. At the time I didn't realize how cool it was to be using the first graphical web browser. Well technically it was NCSA Mosaic before they licensed it to Spry.

Shortly after version 2.0 came out and we bought it in a kit called Internet In A Box. That kit came with a web browser, email client, ftp client, gopher client, archie client, etc... I don't remember how long after, but one Halloween I was looking for Halloween sites and found one that Microsoft made. It wouldn't let me in unless I used IE. I think IE 1.0 or 2.0 was pre-installed with Windows 95 so I tried it there. It supported background pictures, background music, and seemed so much richer. All the sites I used to visit looked different in IE. I didn't realize there was more to them, and that Mosaic didn't support the newer HTML stuff.

This entry seems like a trip down memory lane. Well I'll get it all out :) About a year later I was in grade 8 and we had to make a brochure for something. I decided to do one on Central Park. I did all my research on the Internet using IE and sumbled upon centralpark.com. It wouldn't let me in unless I was using Netscape 3.0. I installed it, then went back to the site. I was shocked... now there were frames, and popup windows that controlled navigation of windows below it. This was just fantastic. It supported all the other things IE did too, so I stuck with Netscape for a couple years until I realized how bad Netscape 4 was at rendering things. That's when I switched back to IE for a couple years. Then onto Netscape 6, back to IE, then to Mozilla... where I am today.

Ok just one last thing to talk about. Remember I talked about the first time I ever used IE for a Halloween site? I discovered that all the websites I was visiting before had more to them what I knew about when viewing them with Mosaic. I had the same experience with BBSing. I was using the Windows 3.1 terminal program to call my first few BBS's. There was no colour and it didn't support high ASCII so you had to use your imagination to make out the pictures someone drew. I thought it was pretty neat. I spent most of my time on a BBS called Floppies; the first BBS I ever called. On there I frequently used FidoNet and file areas. Anyway.. one day I was at a friend's house and his dad used to use the same BBS. He was using Procomm Plus, a program I had never heard of. I watched him log in and saw colour, high ascii, and real pictures!! I had no idea that bbs's were colour and the crappy pictures shown in low-ascii on my PC actually looked like pictures with a terminal capable of high-ascii. Procomm Plus also had an auto-dialer that would cycle through the BBS list in the phone book until it could connect to one that didn't have a busy signal. I could watch tv for 30 mins and when it finally connected to a BBS it would play a sound in the speakers letting me know. Ahh the good'ol days of BBSing :) For some reason I later switched to Telix and used that for the rest of my dialup BBS days. Now for telnet BBSing I use Hyperterminal on Windows because it renders ANSI flawlessly, and supports ZModem.

On google search for "gamesrv". That's a popular program for bridging DOS dial-up BBS software to Telnet. My HOW-TO shows up as the second hit. Now search for "runtime error 200 bbs". My HOW-TO shows up as the #1 link! Runtime error 200 happens on BBS door games written in Pascal. Something to do with the Y2K problem. I put links to some programs that can either patch your EXEs or that run a TSR that patches them in memory. I wrote both of these myself, of course. Hah I wish..