modified By-Tor / Bytor BBS - Still Forgetting It!

A number of years ago, I dug up some ancient printer dumps of "modified" By-Tor BBS and a few other hard copy bits and pieces essential to operating this Commodore 64 program. Realizing that enough of it was there, and having seen nothing online, I began to type.

Edit: the result is found in this blog post. You can download a copy of your own.

Waiting for Call screen in 'modified' By-Tor BBS. Released by 'The Fish'. Original program by Al Hershman.

Modified By-Tor is a monolithic, BASIC RAM-filling board that time had full reason to forget. I am sure my recalling it from piracy Valhalla will give persons pause to wonder how on earth something so forgettable can still offend the sensibilities today. But it can, and certainly will "real soon now".

Having typed it all in, a few issues gave me pause and have managed to pause me to this post and beyond. I still haven't made it ready for sharing, and I am no further than I was a a few years ago in getting the chat music working, which I am giving up on.

Visitors to a By-Tor BBS can page the sysop in order to talk with him or her. Unlike all other BBS software during it's era (300 baud/early through mid-80s), By-Tor's chat request function played music on the sysop's computer if the monitor was on and it's speaker volume audible. The visitor to the BBS could also execute the chat command a second time in order to turn off the page/music on the sysop's end of the connection, and had ample reason to do so.

One more unique feature of the chat command was that when the music played on the sysop's machine, By-Tor fired CTRL-G characters to the visitor's machine over the modem connection. CTRL-G in Commodore 64 BBS and terminal programs are wired the same as any other ASCII devices or programs - It rings a bell when the character arrives, if one has been hooked up for the application. If you happened to be quietly surfing BBSs at 3AM, the arrival of these characters would surely wake the dead if you had forgotten to dial down the speaker after an evening of game-playing.

When I generated these printer dumps all those years ago, I had no idea I would rue the day I printed what I did. The vital contents of one file in particular required me to go into my SuperSnapshot v4 cartridge in order to print something useful. The "ml" file in By-Tor holds the Punter.C1 single file transfer code, a screen dump's worth of text that tells a newly connected visitor that the software in use on the machine is 'modified' By-Tor BBS, and finally, just beyond this screen dump lays the very music the BBS plays when chat is requested.

Instead of dumping a series of values to the printer that would allow me to easily recreate the music, I chose to dump SuperSnashot's "Interpret" output. In this mode within the Snapshot's monitor, what is displayed on screen is a rendering of the music values as character data. I dumped that display to printer, which allowed me to easily read the screen dumped information, but it turned the music data into a mangle of gibberish characters and graphics.

When I finished typing in all I needed to type in to make By-Tor go, the only big thing missing was data that would play back the actual music. I tried numerous times to hammer in values that would recreate what I saw in my Snapshot monitor. But each time I was stymied by the din it played. I have never been a Martin Galway or Ben Daglish. So I delayed, put off, and finally forgot about it.

Recently running into the files all over again on a partially working laptop I had set aside, I awoke to the idea that putting it off forever will eventually mean it's loss. Not that I am gasping my last or that the world will resuccitate this mouldering heap of a program. But as bad and clunky and horrible as it was to compose messages in, this 300 baud BBS program had a huge following locally and doesn't deserve such a fate.

When the two DIP switch Commodore 1670 modems arrived and began their crushing of the 300 baud BBS programs out of existence, the final 300 baud Commodore color BBS king of the Toronto area was unquestionably 'modified' By-Tor. It had become the defacto alternative to Darkstar BBS, a locally developed payware color BBS whose army of Darkterm callers found By-Tor's opening screen a tacit demand and very welcoming. It exhorted them to use Darkterm in keyboard mode - but in By-Tor - which they did in droves.

Again, I am putting it off. But real soon now means just that.

Honest!

OK... This time for Real!

Still dickering!

Err... Wait and see!

Business Cards in a Particular Vein

One of the unexpected joys of sorting through old stuff is reacquainting yourself with things you forgot you had.

Where I picked this up precisely, I am not quite sure. There were a small number of businesses in the Toronto downtown that had these business cards back in the 1980s. They would have been surreptitiously left alongside other assorted business cards, flyers, etc. You can still find such oddball piles of ad/trash/bulletin stuff today. At that time, you would see these Van Halen Cafe business cards in record stores such as Record Peddler, or in the odd club or maybe even a restaurant. I know I'd seen them numerous times before I actually pocketed one or two of 'em.

I'm none the wiser to the producer of the cards, though I have my suspicions it'd be someone like Nash The Slash or a character of that sort (personality character, not another mummified peformer). His own records included bogus record company addresses and contact information. Places you'd passed hundreds of times, and when you stopped and actually looked to see, you'd rebuke yourself for being so gullible.

The Van Halen Cafe - The Transformation of Waste card was a quiet campaign. It needled playfully without any fuss. Hitting the right chord with anyone who shared the same sentiment, or darkening some Q-107 fanboy's day. But only for as long as it takes them to say aloud "Waste!?! Everyone ^&*@%& loves Van Halen!" to which the gleeful mass of passing, like-minded plebes might retort "&%^@$^% right!" You can only wonder how many people actually walked back and forth near the 600 block, looking up and down the facade with beady eyes, ready to take umbrage the moment they found their way.

Yet each time, a failure.

Brings a wry smile to my face all over again. I hope it brightens and darkens as much as it did back then. Because as we all knew... Van Halen sucked!