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.