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.