BeeBS the BBS hosted on a Beeb is Live!

[vela025]

Hi All,

BeeBS the BBS running on my BBC Micro is up and ready for callers. It has undergone some light testing so please let me know if you encouter bugs. I'm adding new content all the time so leave a message on the board and pop back anytime. I'll post any feature and content updates to this thread.

Connection Options:

From a real Beeb
Point your favouite Terminal (not viewdata) emulator to beebs.ddns.net:6502 (8n1, 9600 Baud, Mode 7 and ensure Filtering is Off). I'd recommend either Commstar or Termulator (Commstar works well with downloads).

From a PC (Windows/Linux/MacOS)
Any terminal emulator that supports vt100 will work, I recommend Syncterm. Address: beebs.ddns.net Port: 6502
When asked during the sign up process you DO want linefeeds and your computer DOES NOT support BBC Colour graphics.

Emulation
It does not work well with BeebEm, you will be missing the last few characters of the most recent line sent which is usually the menu input option; it will still work you just won't be able to see what you're typing. Pressing ? will update the screen. If you cannot see what you're doing and just need to log off, repeatedly pressing Q will achieve this.

How to use
At the Menu Prompt you need to type ? or press Enter to see the options
If you want to leave a message on the boards to everyone, type ALL when prompted

All the sections that you have access to including Message Boards, Special Interst Groups, Private Email and downloads (on a Beeb) should be working, if you do wish to dowload please read the information on the download page (instructions are for Commstar). If you need to change your terminal setting this can be done from the <T> option on the main menu. There is a slight quirk with detecting Caps Lock on a PC via Syncterm (it thinks it's on when it's off and vice versa).

BeeBS is using the archived version of OBBS from this forum by Rob O'Donnell which I have modified. BeeBS isn't going to be online 24/7 so if you'd like to connect just check the status at http://beebs.ddns.net which has the schedule I'll try to stick to. There's only one "line" so connections will timeout after 2 min of inactivity, you should recieve a message if you try to connect but the board is engaged. If you can, please log out using the log off menu options (either quick or long). If you'd like to cancel an operation (for example downloading a file) the keyboard shortcut is ctrl-k.

Enjoy!

Messaging Menu on a Beeb

Messaging Menu using Syncterm

[Cruxinc]

this is incredible! well done!

[vela025]

this is incredible! well done!

Thanks Cruxinc, I can't take much of the credit, Rob O'Donnell did a great job in the first place creating OBBS in 1984, but I'm pleased I've made it hayes compatible, Y2K compliant, ported it to ADFS and got a timeout feature working.

Be sure to log in and leave a message when you can!

[brianmartin_2001]

Major congrats on this Ed ,

I can highly recommend folk to try out BeeBS.
It's excellent we have Message boards on a retro Acorn machine again.
I will visit again tonight .

Great to see this come to fruition and on OBBS,
the first & original BBC Micro BBS program ! Terrific to have another real,
retro Acorn BBS around.

Brian

[brianmartin_2001]

Just a thought Cruxinc ,

Might be an idea to invest your pocket money on a Wi-modem
or a RPI with the right software and get your Model B online.

Then you could start exploring all the BBSes
around the world with your Beeb. Plus now, you have two
UK Acorn BBSes you can log into as well.

[Cruxinc]

Just a thought Cruxinc ,

Might be an idea to invest your pocket money on a Wi-modem
or a RPI with the right software and get your Model B online.

Then you could start exploring all the BBSes
around the world with your Beeb. Plus now, you have two
UK Acorn BBSes you can log into as well.

Interested… how much do they usually go for? Thanks for informing me!

[brianmartin_2001]

Well there's a number of them, you would need to get a modem for around 30-40 quid.
and then get a lead to fit to your Beeb which shouldn't be expensive.
These two items work together perfectly.

https://www.cbmstuff.com/index.php?rout ... duct_id=60
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/124672712455

There are other modems although you would have to again get a lead made up
to fit it, depending on the signals on the pins of that particular modem.
There have been several modems talked about on Stardot. This here is a UK made one
but I don't have a link to a ready made lead for it. But I am sure your dad could
help you sort one out.

https://www.simulant.uk/shop/retro-vint ... compatible

here's a couple of videos of a wi-modem working on a Beeb.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFkFPfOnGWo&t=4s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7h8UPUbAkA&t=1s

There are other ways, using a Raspberry Pi or a PC/laptop as your modem using
a program called TCPser, which could be a cheaper way for you but a wi-modem is probably the easiest.

Brian

[chrisn]

I'm working on fixing the issues in BeebEm, so it was really useful to be able to connect and give it a test just now.

I was doing the same a few weeks ago, connecting to The Night Owl and had a good chat with Brian.

Here's a screenshot of my session, using Commstar:

[brianmartin_2001]

It's really great you are working on a reliable method to access with Beebem Chris.
This will really help any Retro board in increasing their visitor traffic, even those just curious or otherwise.
Enjoyed our chat when you were on Night Owl. I noticed you tried again another time
subsequently but were unsuccessful. If you ever need private time access to Night Owl
just PM me and I will organise. I am sure Ed would do similarly with BeeBS now it is up & running.

cheers
Brian

[marrold]

ported it to ADFS

Nice to see another BBC based BBS come online and great work on the improvements and porting it to ADFS should make it a bit more usable with the increase in disk space.

I'll login and look around next time its running.

Might be an idea to invest your pocket money on a Wi-modem

Watch this space... I've sent some PCBs off to get manufactured in the hope of creating a cheapish WiFi modem available in the UK. I'll keep you posted.

[vela025]

I'm working on fixing the issues in BeebEm, so it was really useful to be able to connect and give it a test just now.

That's great thank you, I caught the last bit of your session when I popped in the room and noticed tcpser log was going crazy with a lot of:

Code: Select all

PARSING NVT COMMAND

Which doesn't seem to happen when connected via a modern terminal emulator. As Brian said let me know if you need it left of for testing at any point.

Cheers,
Ed

[brianmartin_2001]

Don't want to remove Ed's announcement on BeeBS from the
top of the Forum , but just want to notify all
Night Owl is up ..

Some new Blog posts on the launch of BeeBS included.

cheers

[Cruxinc]

Well there's a number of them, you would need to get a modem for around 30-40 quid.
and then get a lead to fit to your Beeb which shouldn't be expensive.
These two items work together perfectly.

https://www.cbmstuff.com/index.php?rout ... duct_id=60
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/124672712455

There are other modems although you would have to again get a lead made up
to fit it, depending on the signals on the pins of that particular modem.
There have been several modems talked about on Stardot. This here is a UK made one
but I don't have a link to a ready made lead for it. But I am sure your dad could
help you sort one out.

https://www.simulant.uk/shop/retro-vint ... compatible

here's a couple of videos of a wi-modem working on a Beeb.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFkFPfOnGWo&t=4s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7h8UPUbAkA&t=1s

There are other ways, using a Raspberry Pi or a PC/laptop as your modem using
a program called TCPser, which could be a cheaper way for you but a wi-modem is probably the easiest.

Brian

thanks for the info! will old original modems (with correct lead) work with this?
as you may know i prefer to use the original tech to the modern!
oh and one last thing, could i use the prestel/ yelexext wedge for this to adapt from modem to beeb?
thanks a lot!

[julians]

thanks for the info! will old original modems (with correct lead) work with this?
as you may know i prefer to use the original tech to the modern!
oh and one last thing, could i use the prestel/ yelexext wedge for this to adapt from modem to beeb?
thanks a lot!

To directly use an 'old school' modem with your beeb, you'll need to be able to connect to the BBS via a telephone call, rather than a TCP/IP connection - I'm sure there are still people out there running BBS's just like they did back in the day.
The Teletext adaptor is for receiving / decoding analogue TV broadcast Teletext and won't help you with this.
The Prestel adaptor, as modems go is fairly limited (speeds, blinking lights, control interface etc) and likely to be more expensive than searching on your favourite online site for a used external RS-232 (not USB) Hayes compatible modem which people would / could / might have used back then if they could afford it - just ignore that it's way more capable than one from ten years earlier, gaze at the beige box with the blinking lights, auto dialling and be amazed at the speeds when limiting it to somewhere betwen 300 and 2400 bits per second...

Julian.

[vela025]

Update 8th Jan

• New Atom Download section (work in progress)

• New Retro Releases section in BBC Downloads (permission has been gained from authors)

• Chat with SysOp feature removed for now whilst troubleshooting

I'd really appreciate if anyone has a real Beeb they can connect with to connect and let me know how you get on along with how you're connecting (software on the beeb side and the device used). I only have one Beeb which is the one hosting the system (I know the correct solution is to buy more beebs ) so all I can do is use BeebEm, RPCEmu and Syncterm for testing which all work (apart from BeebEm missing the last line of text, but it looks like that is solved now). A real beeb has connected and has succesfully downloaded files to disc using cp/m transfer, chatted with sysop and left a few messages, however at some point the connection always seems to freeze, but not drop (at both ends) and TcpSer logging output goes a little crazy. I'm trying to isolate the issue but could do with another Beeb/Electron (or any other older hardware) trying to connect to see what happens.

Thanks again,
Ed

[chrisn]

I'm working on fixing the issues in BeebEm, so it was really useful to be able to connect and give it a test just now.

That's great thank you, I caught the last bit of your session when I popped in the room and noticed tcpser log was going crazy with a lot of:

Code: Select all

PARSING NVT COMMAND

Which doesn't seem to happen when connected via a modern terminal emulator. As Brian said let me know if you need it left of for testing at any point.

I was seeing the same, but I'm not sure what's causing it. I just connected again using a more recent tcpser from here, and don't see those messages. I just get one of these lines every few seconds:

Code: Select all

2024-01-08 20:07:13:42949857600:INFO:Control Lines: DSR:1 DCD:1 CTS:1 RI:0
2024-01-08 20:07:14:42949857600:INFO:Control Lines: DSR:1 DCD:1 CTS:1 RI:0
2024-01-08 20:07:18:42949857600:INFO:Control Lines: DSR:1 DCD:1 CTS:1 RI:0
2024-01-08 20:07:21:42949857600:INFO:Control Lines: DSR:1 DCD:1 CTS:1 RI:0

I also downloaded a couple of files from the BBC Downloads section.

[vela025]

I was seeing the same, but I'm not sure what's causing it. I just connected again using a more recent tcpser from here, and don't see those messages. I just get one of these lines every few seconds:

Code: Select all

2024-01-08 20:07:13:42949857600:INFO:Control Lines: DSR:1 DCD:1 CTS:1 RI:0
2024-01-08 20:07:14:42949857600:INFO:Control Lines: DSR:1 DCD:1 CTS:1 RI:0
2024-01-08 20:07:18:42949857600:INFO:Control Lines: DSR:1 DCD:1 CTS:1 RI:0
2024-01-08 20:07:21:42949857600:INFO:Control Lines: DSR:1 DCD:1 CTS:1 RI:0

I also downloaded a couple of files from the BBC Downloads section.

I didn't save the log, but it looked just like a normal connection on my end too. If you need a copy of a log let me know and I'll save it next time. How did the downloads work out for you? I didn't check just how big the castle of riddles walkthrough was ! If you did want to cancel a transfer it's ctrl - k.

I've been using the Fozztexx fork from https://github.com/fozztexx/tcpser, but will look into the newer one you've been using and see if that's a good fit. I'm always a bit unsure what arguments to use with it and so have settled on:

Code: Select all

-i -tsSiI -i "X3S0=1&C1&S2=128" -l 7 

I don't know if this is causing problems with a real Beeb, but it seems BeebEm worked well for you this evening, a C64 that connected earlier and quite a few Terminal connections have all been ok.

Thanks for all the effort you're putting in to BeebEm!

[chrisn]

I was also using the FozzTexx version before. To use the go4retro version, I downloaded the Windows .exe file https://github.com/go4retro/tcpser/blob ... tcpser.exe and I also had to get the latest cygwin1.dll. It's interesting that you also didn't see those messages and you were using FozzTexx.

The options I've been using are:

Code: Select all

tcpser -v 25232 -p 6400 -l 4 -s 9600

The file downloads worked fine, the "How to download page" explains what to do. Castle of Riddles is 1F00 bytes, so not too big for Commstar to buffer!

[brianmartin_2001]

thanks for the info! will old original modems (with correct lead) work with this?
as you may know i prefer to use the original tech to the modern!
oh and one last thing, could i use the prestel/ yelexext wedge for this to adapt from modem to beeb?
thanks a lot!


Julians has pretty much covered your questions there around the Prestel and Teletext adaptors.
Most BBS systems now use the internet as their main communications medium now.
There are some still around that use dialup over the phone (which is authentic retro) but
it costs money for a phone call but its not that much at all if you have the right phone call package.
Examples of dialup systems in the UK are - my own BBS (Night Owl BBS), (Telstar), (Dialup Nights),
(Magnum BBS) and there are others too that are essentially internet based but you can access them through
a gateway phone number . The BBSes I named are also available over the Internet too and are
most commonly accessed that way these days. Dialup with an old modem is for those who really just
like the nostalgic touch , this includes myself. It has a certain magic that you might like.

You'll have much less choice of BBS destinations if you are solely using an old dialup modem but you can
get plenty for a similar price as a wi-modem.

When I was a kid, using a modem blew my mind. They are great fun as long as you don't end up
with a monster phone bill like I did. Much less chance of that these days though.

[marrold]

I've got TCPSer going so I'm waiting in the queue to connect now

[marrold]

I managed to connect and it looks great. I'm looking forward to using the messages feature some more.



I was using a BBC Micro Model B with Commstar II and TCPSer running on a Raspberry Pi.

I did get caught out by the line wraps when sending a message but vela jumped in and let me know where I was going wrong. One other observation, messages #19 and #29 seemed to be tagged private but I could read them.

At times the clock displayed by Commstar was getting in the way. It doesn't seem possible to disable it, does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks

[vela025]

At times the clock displayed by Commstar was getting in the way. It doesn't seem possible to disable it, does anyone have any suggestions?

According to manual it seems it's because BeeBS is over 2400 baud. You need to turn off the Lock status in the System Options Menu (F2)

[marrold]

Thanks, I'm not entirely sure that was the issue but it looks much better disabled.

[vela025]

OBBS Updates 14th Jan

• Acorn Electron Downloads now has a New Releases Area

• Swapped from Fozztexx' TcpSer to Go4Retro TcpSer

• Message Line Editor has returned

The downloads area now has a dedicated Acorn Electron New Releases area, containing games from 0xC0DE and Snuggsy187.

I've swapped to Go4Retro's TcpSer fork in the hope it would solve some of the connection issues that occur seemingly at random, but since swapping over whilst certain issues have improved (no more PARSING NVT COMMAND spamming the tcpser log) there is still the occasinal drop in connection usually caused by my Beeb crashing.

There was a bug in the uploaded version of OBBS which corrupted messages which had been edited by the line editor, this has been repaired.

[IanJeffray]

Address: beebs.ddns.net Port: 6502

Connection refused.

[vela025]

Address: beebs.ddns.net Port: 6502

Connection refused.

Hi Ian,
It's not on 24/7, you can check the status at http://beebs.ddns.net. I'll go and load it up now as I happen to be at home.
Thanks,
Ed

[gavinlew]

When I’m feeling better I’ll give this a go from my real Beeb with a wifi modem

Would also be happy to build up a machine and leave it on 24/7 and run another uk based machine , always wanted to do this in the 80s/90s

[vela025]

When I’m feeling better I’ll give this a go from my real Beeb with a wifi modem

Would also be happy to build up a machine and leave it on 24/7 and run another uk based machine , always wanted to do this in the 80s/90s

It would be great to see you there, it's turning in to a lively little community which is great. The only thing stopping me having it up 24/7 is the unknown condition of my PSU so I'll be getting the repair kit from retroclinic. Annoyingly there's also something in obbs/tcpser that makes my beeb crash, althought I'm yet to find what is causing the actual problem...which is infuriating!

Although I did find this on 8bs, but I'm not so sure this is the actual issue I'm encourtering http://8bs.com/submit/subjoin2bbc.htm:

Apparently, some Masters have RS423 hardware which apparently overheats on occasion and sometimes corrupts the bytes passing through the RS423. I have no personal experience of this, but having seen it mentioned in Archive (volume 1, issue 1) I felt that I ought to mention it just in case.

Hopefully see you on BeeBS, it's online now!

[gavinlew]

Sounds great

How are the inbound IP connections being handled and passed back to the Beeb, I’m presuming this is what the pi/tcpser is handling?

[vela025]

Sounds great

How are the inbound IP connections being handled and passed back to the Beeb, I’m presuming this is what the pi/tcpser is handling?

Yeah inbound connetions come in on port 6502 via DDNS which is pointing towards by rpi3, this is running tcpser which is waiting for connections emulating a Hayes modem, when it receives a "call" the data is passed to and from the Master 128 using the RS432 port which is connected via a serial cable to a serial to usb converter plugged in to the pi.