Denial

One of the first BBSes we had in our state of Rhode Island was The Roundtable, which was more of an online game for social networking rather than the files & posts that were springing up. It was run on an Apple ][ by King Richard and he was generous to keep it free all of the time. Later, I had an opportunity to debug some of its code and later walked off with the Apple BASIC source code as my starting point to port it to other machines.

My father and two brothers enjoyed playing the game and my ports of it (DOS, Amiga, Linux) since 1986. I ran my DOS port on an IBM XT with 512k RAM and two 5-1/4" floppies with a 2400 baud modem. The Amiga ports (both a standalone BBS and as a door) were a lot fancier.

I am still running the Linux port (since 1999) and re-started it for Internet play. If you enjoyed BBS or recall the popular BBS door, Hack & Slash, then come have a visit at http://robert.hurst-ri.us/games/rpgd which has a Java applet terminal client to START playing. The game is very quick to pickup. There are online instruction pages and even a custom Windows terminal client if you like local sound effects.

This past year, I've been picking up on Node.js and TypeScript. That lead me to begin a legacy C port of Hack & Slash using TypeScript. While it's still alpha, it's far enough along that it caught the attention of a few Amiga BBS sysops -- telling me their story, encouraging me to finish the work, and even got a few ASCII art files floated my way from their dusty archives.

The re-imagined project is called Dank Domain: the return of Hack & Slash. Or use telnet. Give it a try out some Saturday morning.

FWIIW, almost a year later, I have the site hosted on Google: https://ddgame.us with the game door playing as: http://play.ddgame.us but still pointing to my home DMZ server. Its development progress has been a satisfying journey to date. It's more playable using an ordinary tablet too.

Onward!

Nice. I ran hack and Slash on my BBS years back myself. Good memories. At the online BBS peak, it had a lot of users playing it who got pretty competitive with this and a few of the other BBS 'doors' on the system.

I will admit, I ran it via a special wrapper one of the coders in the demo group I was in created so it would work via the MAXs BBS software.

"WELCOME TO MY DOMAIN!"

The multi-user game has moved into the Google Cloud Platform:
https://play.DDgame.us

... and the game is fronted by a Google Site portal:
https://www.DDgame.us

Happy hunting!