Joshie.com

So you setup a WildCat! (a.k.a. Winserver) BBS and wonder what you'll do with it. The most fun thing besides conferencing with people is probably Door Games. Ok so perhaps Doors can be more fun that conferences. I wanted to write about my experiences with Doors and offer some tips.

The first doors I installed were from Sunrise Door Software. The author, Al, is very friendly. Gangland Wars and Time Travel: Installing these were very simple. Each game has a WCX file that you copy in to c:\wc5 (assuming this is where WildCat! is installed). Next you simply open the Menus program in the WildCat! config program. I made a new menu called Online Games. I like that better than using the Doors app because it's more flexible. So you make a menu item that runs a wcBasic program and put GANGLAND for Gangland Wars and in the next TTRAVEL for Time Travel. In Parameters you put the full path to where each game is. For Gangland Wars I put c:\wc5\doors\GLAND\ because I put it there. I tend to put all my doors in the c:\wc5\doors\ location. Of course you might want to make an ANSI screen for your Online Games area. It's very simple. Just copy the main5, main6, and main9 as templates. If you have questions feel free to ask on Haz-Mat III.

The next game I installed was Trade Wars 2002 from Epic. They have a cool new thing called TWGS that makes it so it's a game server instead of a door. It's accessed via Telnet. You don't even need a BBS to run it, but I wanted to force people through my BBS so I bought TWGS Lite with TW2002 for $40 and set it up in the config so that rlogin was enabled and it only listened on 127.0.0.1 which is the loopback adapter. There is also a WCX file to copy in to c:\wc5\ to integrate with WildCat!. Now in your online games menu you would add an entry that runs a wcBasic program called wcTWGS and the parameter I used was 127.0.0.1:2002 where you would change 2002 to the port you set as the server port. Game runs just dandy.

Now there are also two more kinds of doors. Classic 16-bit ones and 32-bit ones. I'll save those for next week. For now try to get the above two games going, and if you have any trouble at all just visit Haz-Mat III to discuss them.

Long long ago I used to run a BBS called Hat-Mat II. Before that Haz-Mat, and at one point it was Roadkill. All of them run on the Apple ][GS. I used to love them. So the other day someone pointed me to an old board that is now reachable via telnet. It brought back lots of memories. So I have owned WildCat! 5 for more than 3 years now without doing anything with it. I bought it right after 9/11 when I was in a down mood and thought a BBS might cheer me up. Well I never did anything with it. So since I moved to NJ I have been finding lots of free time. I bought the 6.0 update and some add-ons and have the board up and running. Right now it's nothing flashy at all. Just works and has some games, but I'm going to get it up and running on FidoNet in the next week or two, and have other plans to make it nice. If you want to see it just...

telnet bbs.haz-matiii.com

I have a really cool game on there called Global War which is like RISK and is so much fun. If you are not a fan of Telnet then you can always download the WildCat! Navigator and connect with that. It's a pretty nice messaging client for BBSing. I assume on Linux you can run it in WINE because it's so simplistic.

In the coming weeks I will post tips about setting things up on WildCat! systems to help anyone else that would like to get up and running with a BBS. With privacy slowly slipping away in the United States, I feel that my BBS is my last place that I can express myself without the government getting up in my face. Sure this blog is nice, but it's still out there on the public Internet. I think we're going to see a lot of community systems appear to protect freedom of speech since the government has no care to.