Roxbury Software

I miss running a BBS. That was back when you actually felt like YOU controlled the computer, not the other way around. These days even programmers don’t understand why the computer is acting up. It seems to take a village of IT people just to run a word processor.

That’s not how it always used to be. Back in the 90’s when I ran a BBS with Color64 on a Commodore 64 it only took one person to run the whole show. Not that it was a big show or very long running. Mine was canceled after about two years. And for good reason, it wasn’t very interesting. I didn’t have much software available to download and I wasn’t able to locate a ton of BBS ‘doors’ as they were called to play games on. Though I had a few.

My absolute favorite was called Nuke Em. In Nuke Em you played as a country and had to buy various parts of missiles and build a missile stockpile. Once you had a stock pile the only logical and fun thing to do is nuke your enemies. While that sounds more like real life now, back then it was fun. Like when as a boy I played ‘War’. Now days if my son asked to play ‘War’ I wouldn’t let him for fear that he would be shot by accident by the police. Not that police are wrong mind you, they just have a very tough job. And when they make mistakes, that’s all you hear about for a week on the news.

Anyways, back to the BBS, I also wasn’t able to generate much conversations on my board either. Considering that I maybe had 25 members that only wanted to download software I guess that shouldn’t have surprised me. But boy did I have grandiose dreams for that board. So I have been looking for a way to run Color64 again.

I don’t really have room or access to run a real C64. But even if I did it seems that the only instructions on the Internet today seem to require using a Windows system as the interface to the net. And since I am not made out of money I am using what I have available, an old PC I thought was dead running Linux. And I can’t seem to find ANYWHERE for step by step to run Color64 on VICE and get it to pick up the line when someone ‘calls’ in.

So I am doing the next best thing. Writing software to emulate the experience for me. Which is a HUGE undertaking. One of the issues is terminal emulation. Commodore computers used a customized keyboard to display text in a different way then other computers. This allowed them to have graphics in text. (See the homepage for an example.) Even HTML won’t do that as easily as the Commodore did.

Another issue with terminal emulation is nobody sits still. How much time do you spend in front of a laptop or desktop vs a phone or tablet? I spend a lot of time with a laptop but that’s at work. To really have fun I need to be able to access the BBS from a tablet or phone. That means emulate the experience of sitting behind my Commodore 64 in HTML so I can use my iPad to play those games. That’s a tough order. But one I might be able to accomplish by the time my kids emulate the XBox 360 to relive their youth like I am doing with the Atari 2600 now. So check back from time to time. Hopefully I will be able to post links to this project so everyone can experience those two Mountain Dew fueled years close to how I did. (Minus the heart problems I am sure all of that caffeine I drank will cause. And late nights spent fixing a door to work.)