Edit: the result is found in this blog post. You can download a copy of your own.
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| 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!
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| Still dickering! |
Err... Wait and see!
I ran my BBS on By-Tor in the late 80s. Created by The Fish if I remember correctly. The later versions had casino games - you could rack up points and earn credits for downloads. It also had cursor control - so in emails it would show the path you used to write the email - you could use the up and down arrows to zoom around. That feature made for interesting BBS intro screens that were a rudimentary form of animation.
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't an easy platform to be able to obtain - you had to know someone who would refer you - and then get full permission to use it. And they were quite serious about the permission. When I finally signed off my 64 - I made sure to destroy my copy. But a few months later got a threatening call on my mom's answering machine from an anonymous caller who said I had distributed it. I actually hadn't, my mom and I were a little scared - I was a 12 year old kid and she had no idea what this creepy call was about - or how they tracked down her number. The By_Tor cyber henchmen had been unleashed!
Hilarious.
Playing games to earn download credits! Why hadn't I thought of that for my BBS?! Deflect the leech-happy kids from their desired downloads by engaging them in games of chance over download potential instead.
DeleteYour comment about having to "know someone who would refer you" and getting "permission" is itself hilarious, and it rings true. Because By-Tor was rarely seen shared in BBS download directories, it had an aura about it that made such myth-making possible. Like the supposed author of the N-th modification who built upon a foundation that was itself un-authorized somehow entitled them to be regarded as underground popes, and whose handiwork was to be accorded all the respect as ordained by the pope... Brilliant!