I recently recovered my old DOS based BBS from tape and for grins I downloaded Gamesvr from Mannsoft to emulate a modem via Telnet sessions. Well I found out it doesn't do modems exactly, just the FOSSIL support via NetFoss. But then the external games like Lord, Operattion Overkill, Tradewars 2002 V3.09, etc even with FOSSIL support expect a real modem and won't work. Or rather they do, but don't echo the output back to the user's terminal for some strange reason?

I saw on Mannsoft's site a MannDoor toolkit to build BBS doors:
[link|http://www.mannsoft.ca/manndoor.php|http://www.mannsoft.ca/manndoor.php]

I haven't worked with it yet, but it claims to be portable to other languages and platforms.

I recently found out that BBSes are not dead yet, just that most of them are telnettable now. WWIV has 5.0 in Alpha test with 32 bit Windows and Linux ports instead of just DOS and OS/2 ports. There also is a new DOOR32.SYS format for drop-files.

I imagine writing a door like Food Fight would be easy, but Tradewars or Operation Overkill games that are more complex would be a lot harder.

The twist is that if I wrote BBS doors I would make them open source so they could be ported to other platforms. Imagine a C++ version of Food Fight, Stock Market, etc? A lot of these old Doors are useless because they don't support FOSSIL or they aren't Telnetable if they do support FOSSIL. So there may well be a niche in here for me if I can crank up my brain and learn a new language like C++ and write some doors. Not sure how I can make money on it unless I ask/beg for donations?

Anyone have any pointers for writting BBS programs and doors/games?