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> DOS door games I learned about programming DOS comms, interrupts, TSRs, etc as a young teenager by writing a shareware door support library for PCBoard and Q

> DOS door games I learned about programming DOS comms, interrupts, TSRs, etc as a young teenager by writing a shareware door support library for PCBoard and QuickBBS in Turbo Pascal called TriDoor. It was only mildly successful as shareware (I think I made a total of about $300) but it taught me a lot and I made a bunch of friends along the way. I later embarked on writing a MUD like BBS package, but went off to college before it was finished. As soon as I had access to the net, the BBS got way less interesting for me.

evanelias 5y ago
Very cool! I vaguely recall the name TriDoor. I became a door author in the very late days of the scene (late 90s into early 00s, as most boards started transitioning from dialup to telnet). I opted for C++ though and purchased a copy of the excellent OpenDoors door kit so I never had to worry about the DOS comms side of things myself :) My games were also multi-user, the most popular being a MUD that eventually ran on a few hundred boards. Developing a MUD that could run as a DOS-based BBS door game was pretty challenging, since each user had their own copy of the exe running (due to how doors inherently worked), but DOS didn't provide IPC primitives. So I shunted all real gameplay processing to a single one of those processes (whoever entered the game first) and the others just communicated with that one via shared append-only files. If that player exited the game, there would be a brief pause while the next lowest node number took over gameplay processing. I don't remember what happened if that next-lowest-node player also left at the exact same time, but probably the game froze/crashed, lol. I later ported my engine to Win32 using a more sane architecture (multi-threaded background process using real win32 IPC to communicate with the door processes), but like you I rapidly lost interest in the BBS world before doing much with it.

evanelias 5y ago

Very cool! I vaguely recall the name TriDoor. I became a door author in the very late days of the scene (late 90s into early 00s, as most boards started transitioning from dialup to telnet). I opted for C++ though and purchased a copy of the excellent OpenDoors door kit so I never had to worry about the DOS comms side of things myself :) My games were also multi-user, the most popular being a MUD that eventually ran on a few hundred boards. Developing a MUD that could run as a DOS-based BBS door game was pretty challenging, since each user had their own copy of the exe running (due to how doors inherently worked), but DOS didn't provide IPC primitives. So I shunted all real gameplay processing to a single one of those processes (whoever entered the game first) and the others just communicated with that one via shared append-only files. If that player exited the game, there would be a brief pause while the next lowest node number took over gameplay processing. I don't remember what happened if that next-lowest-node player also left at the exact same time, but probably the game froze/crashed, lol. I later ported my engine to Win32 using a more sane architecture (multi-threaded background process using real win32 IPC to communicate with the door processes), but like you I rapidly lost interest in the BBS world before doing much with it.