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Ansiwave BBS, a modern BBS with ANSI art and MIDI music
- aphroz 5y agoOpening this website crashes Chrome on my Android device
- nougatbyte 5y ago+1
- peakaboo 5y agoI run Vivaldi because it's actually awesome on the phone (but I don't like the desktop version). Works perfectly.
- stackbutterflow 5y agoIt's a feature.
- charcircuit 5y agoShouldn't a modern BBS support normal videos, images, and audio too?
- peakaboo 5y agoOr maybe it's nice to not have those things. It's a very different feeling.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoWe can compromise and use RIPScript.
- charcircuit 5y agoGoogle says that was used it BBS from the 80s and 90s. I wouldn't call it modern.
- danachow 5y agoGoogle is wrong. In BBS terms it very much was modern. First it dates to 1992, so very late in the BBS era - just prior to the point where larger BBSes were starting to offer shell or SLIP/PPP access and inevitably becoming just ISPes. And it never really caught on. I remember the one time I dialed into a BBS in 93, the video mode changed and this graphical mouse driven screen was rendered. It seemed cool but BBSes as more than an ISP were already dying. The company that made it was a bit interesting - once the web came out they tried to improve it away from its EGA origins, add audio/video and pivot to directly compete with HTML and then Flash - it did not work out. https://web.archive.org/web/19980114110236/http://www.telegrafix.com/products/ripview/features.htm https://web.archive.org/web/19980114110236/http://www.telegr... https://web.archive.org/web/20160820155221/http://www.kytty.com/~jreeder/index.htm#TELEGRAFIX https://web.archive.org/web/20160820155221/http://www.kytty....
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- raverbashing 5y agoWell you can download them through {X,Y,Z}-Modem if you want
- jcims 5y agoPersonally i would say no. I think the lack of that in HN is part of its recipe for success. A file area would be fine, but not inline.
- sekao 5y agoI hesitated with the word choice but when i say "modern" i mean that the project dispenses with the implementation details of BBSes that are not relevant to the "BBS experience", such as the use of telnet/ssh, outdated text encodings, and long signup forms asking for copious amounts of personal info. I think adding images/videos would definitely affect the experience.
- hereforphone 5y agoCan it run door games like LORD? Are the ANSI graphics "real"? These are important things to look for in a modern BBS system for me.
- sekao 5y agoDepends on what you mean by real :D It's all unicode text, but you can actually share old school ANSI art in the .ans format because it includes a cp437 to utf8 converter. No door games but i hope to extend the MIDI scripting language to do other things, including eventually making games. Little programs/games embedded directly inside posts is an exciting idea.
- prometheus76 5y agoSo no ansi animations then?
- sekao 5y agoNope no animations. I think that functionality would come from extensions to the scripting language i mentioned, but that would of course be a different format than original ansi animations.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoA bit of a tangent, but the trust factor was pretty high with BBSes compared to the Internet of today. Many, including the Renegade BBS I ran, asked for your real name, phone number, and home address when signing up. I never thought twice about giving out that info and never had anyone complain to me about needing to provide it.
- giantrobot 5y agoThanks to local toll or long distance fees your local BBS was literally local. Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face. Contrast with Usenet where trolling and flamewars were rampant because instigators could hide behind a veil of anonymity or pseudo-anonymity. The BBS era was also long before public doxxing and spammers scraping any and all personal info. At least before the Internet made such things easily amplified and trivial to do.
- jcims 5y ago>Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face. That and getting banned actually hosed you.
- gavinray 5y ago> "Thanks to local toll or long distance fees your local BBS was literally local. Everyone on it lived nearby and if you were an ass you were close enough to get punched in the face." What? This is mindblowing to me, being born in 1997. I can't imagine an online experience like this, it sounds pretty neat.
- junon 5y agoRemember that the internet as we know it today is young. At the peak of BBSes, you called actual phone numbers to connect to places. If you've ever seen Hackers or War Games, the hardware wasn't too far from reality If the phone number was long distance, you had to pay more - just as it is today. Local calls were usually free. Hence the GP's comment :)
- IronWolve 5y agoToo bad its not a plugin for browsers, and you could post ansiwave content on any site, browsers just detected its its ansiwave code, like an extension to html. Imagine reading a tweet or reddit post with ansiwave content imbedded. (Like Microsoft Chat tried with gfx and irc) Internet really needs to break free from all the control. An overlay network like that disenter browser plugin, you could read comments on any site. Now that all popular sites are closing down comments, kinda shame it died. Also for video, I remember small rle text stream videos on modem, just black and white, pretty easy to do now with unicode, a small 64x64 text box.. (example). Also midi's and awesome .sf2 sound banks. Good times back then, seems the internet lost so much in exchange for government and corporate control.
- DarylZero 5y agoCheck out gemini-space and the lagrange browser.
- gavinray 5y agoThis is a cool idea, I dig it!
- motohagiography 5y agoGit as a protocol for this brilliant. I don’t know it well enough to know what kind of client side moderation policy enforcement might be viable, or curation tools, but very, very compelling idea.
- Dowwie 5y agoCan a Sysop interrupt a session, entering a chat with the user? Where are the doors?
- guytv 5y agoThis is really awesome. But I did not see any posts from users, what am I missing?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ilaksh 5y agoIt seems like its not showing people's username, only 'modleader' when he posts (assuming that is the site creator).
- sekao 5y agoThere are no usernames, only tags, of which modleader is one (and multiple users can have it). Only mods can edit tags, so you can think of them somewhat like flairs on reddit.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y agoSo is there any way to get to know fellow users? If posts don’t have usernames, how do I know that this post is by the same person as that post? Getting to acquainted with fellow users is one of the big benefits of any communication system… even HN.
- sekao 5y agoYou can click on a post and go to "see user", which will show their user page. You could also add a signature to your posts -- they're more fun and personalized anyway. Right now that's manual effort, but i will probably add the ability to preset the editor with something so it's there every time you make a new post. Usernames just don't work because they require an authoritative server to divvy them out. Ansiwave is designed to eventually be partially or completely decentralized -- all users are just ed25519 public keys, and the ID of a post is the signature of it, so there will never be conflicts between users/posts on different servers. In theory we could one day have a decentralized way of registering unique usernames, similar to that DNS-like thing they made on ethereum. But i'm not even close to thinking about that right now.
- thanatos519 5y agoWhy have MIDI music when you can have ANSI music? ESC[<BASIC style music string>^N I miss the days of my animated, musical ANSI signature!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ztjio 5y agoOkay but, can I play Legend of the Red Dragon and Barren Realms Elite? Been a few decades since I had my fix...
- bluefox 5y agohttp://www.lotgd.net/ http://www.lotgd.net/
- mmastrac 5y agoSomething is really busted with this site and Firefox on the mac. I cannot read it at all.
- ytjohn 5y agoI was thinking the same thing, even considering going into dev tools to try and change the font. Didn't realize it was a firefox on mac thing. I went ahead and opened it in Chrome. It's still pretty difficult font to read, but it is a bit brighter in Chrome. https://imgur.com/a/KB5irZv https://imgur.com/a/KB5irZv
- sekao 5y agoYou won't be able to change the font because it's being rendered in webgl. In fact, the page is one big canvas tag. I'm painfully aware of the downsides, but it gives me a lot of control when rendering ANSI art, and will allow me to make a killer desktop GUI app later on (a very fast/efficient opengl program, no electron nonsense). Before anyone asks about accessibility...i should point out i am still injecting a text-only version into the DOM behind the canvas tag for the sake of screenreaders. The reason firefox looks so much worse is that it has a smaller webgl size limit than chrome (specifically MAX_RENDERBUFFER_SIZE). When rendering at full resolution, it was not large enough to hold the content sometimes. I only check that webgl value so this will resolve itself if/when firefox increases it.
- ytjohn 5y agoThanks for the detailed response! I did poke around a bit and noticed none of my changes were having any impact. I never really messed with webgl, so didn't notice that was what was doing the rendering. Is webgl MAX_RENDERBUFFER_SIZE something I can set in about:config or elsewhere? I got my start with BBSes, lots of fond memories. There was one BBS in my area, and they had it setup to RelayNet (similar to FidoNet, but smaller). I knew when they would connect up to exchange, so I would be sure to upload my mail packet and then dial back up 5 minutes after they did their exchange to see if I had any new messages. I could send and reply to messages across the country in a matter of days.
- zquestz 5y agoGreat idea, but it would be nice to have https...
- ms123 5y agoThere’s also https://midnight.pub https://midnight.pub (much more low key though!)