BBS door games

How many true oldfags do we have on here? Anyone remember BBS door games like LORD, Usurper, Exitilus, Planets, and others?

they're usually garbage, as they spent all the time making the bbs art rather than the actual game

Actually, making BBS art was easy back in the day. All you needed was either 1) an ANSI art drawing program or 2) a program to convert GIF to ANSI and then just draw very low res GIFs in Paintbrush and optionally touch them up in the ANSI drawing program (TheDraw was popular back in the day)

Old oldfag here. Trade Wars 2002 was fucking amazing before "utilities" showed up (basically the beginning of botting around 1990). Land of Devastation was also great but no one seems to remember that one. I keep toying with the idea of coding up some way to play it with Holla Forums - it was like a multiplayer Wasteland with base building and a plotline (you'd all play daily until someone managed to finish the plot). The Pit was also pretty cool but required going on proboards which just felt dirty.
My main concern is that exposing these games and mechanics to the light might get them pozzed. Perhaps it's better to just leave them as memories.

I want to go back.

SO after someone finished the plot the game would restart? Kinda cool.

Tell me more stories about the olden days grandpa anons!

Kill yourself faggot

Yeah, that was a common design for MP games back then that's just totally vanished today but it was really fun. In LoD, the game world would be affected by how far the furthest player into it had gotten, and once they killed off the main dude they were immortalized as the the winner and the sysop would restart. In Trade Wars 2002, the game was effectively done after someone conquered Ferengal but you could keep it running. Of course, whoever got that powerful would then usually blockcade the starport to completely fuck the game to declare they /really/ won, and the sysop would restart. These were all heavily PvP games, but also let you form guilds/corps and cooperate. If you were late to the party, you could usually catch up fast by finding 'trash' high level players had left around that were way more powerful than the noob shit you'd have had access to. Many games had various ways to leak resources to low level players (e.g. some percent of bank interest would be redistributed) to prevent locking out late joiners.
So, onwards with some tales of grief from 20-30 years ago!
LoD's bases had password protection and I was really happy that back in the day I 'hacked' a player's base by guessing the password. Her player name was QueenBee, guessed password: beehive. I set it as hostile and when she logged in and went to the base it blew her away and I took her stuff that was left scattered around it the next day.
For Trade Wars 2002, I ran into a player who had guarded a sector with 'invincible' planets (if you were ridiculously rich you could buy so many shields it would flip it to invincible). He thought he'd locked down a cluster of sectors by blockading the entrance. Thing is, I had a bunch of genesis torpedoes that create planets and I knew the mechanics of the game. Nightly, if more than X planets were in a sector (I think 5-10?) it would collide some into the others and destroy them. So I spammed planets in the sector near midnight, and on logging in a few minutes later it had smashed his pride and joy. He was absolutely livid and sent me a bunch of hate mail over fidonet and ragequit.

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I've got all sorts of cool stories, bro. It's time for oldfag tales of hacking!
So back in the '80s, many companies and institutions had modems set up for their services, but security wasn't yet something people thought about much. My friend and I wardialed our area codes (wardialing = automated calling of thousands of numbers to detect which are modems/faxes). He wound up getting in some shit for this as one section he dialed was owned by a pager company and it resulted in sending empty pages to thousands of '80s cool doods with pagers (doctors and lawyers and drug dealers) at like 3am. A police officer went to his house and told his mom and she beat him (he was Argentinian, beatings were normal) but that's all that happened. Very different than what would have happened today.
We found a lot of interesting services, but the most interesting was a shell dialup for a UC school. It required login/password we didn't know but also allowed telnetting to a different host/port with no password. Thing is, back then there was almost no security on internet and services were essentially public. So I guessed their USENET server name and would telnet to port 119 and manually type in the NNTP protocol to read news. And I'd telnet to port 25 to send mail (you could forge the headers back then, there was no security). I used my USENET access to figure out the email address of the Dean and the IT guy and I forged an email to the IT guy from the Dean asking to create a user/pass. A couple days later, success! I had my first shell account.
So we went and bought a bunch of books on UNIX to figure out how the fuck to use it. I also bought networking books and used the shell account to learn network prorgamming (it's how I got started in my career, I still work in networking). Eventually we discovered NIS and that we could just 'ypcat passwd' to dump all the user/hash combos and we ran them through a password cracker (I think the predecessor to john the ripper, was called jack the ripper? I forget). We got some accounts with sudo access and we were off to the races.
We eventually did all the usual stuff - we had 'hacked' netcom just like everyone else (e.g. Mitnick who was actually a skiddie and was getting all his sendmail hacks from a friend in Israel), we 'hacked' into NASA computers (this was so trivial, they had massive blocks of machines with blank root passwords that were party central for everyone around the world) so we could have email accounts in the .gov domain, etc.. We had a good decade of fun. I eventually got noticed for my skills around '99 and was recruited by the team working on the intercept portion of PRISM but no one will believe that and I don't want to say enough to fuck my career, so whatever. The fiber splitter from San Jose you've heard about re PRISM was the one I used to test with. It used to live in my desk.

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I believe you and that all sounds fun as hell. I remember wanting to fuck around/ like that a few years ago and not being able to because everything is actually secure now. Feels bad.

Yeah, it was really fun. It jumpstarted my life as I used to be hanging around chatting and learning from kernel devs, demoscene coders, and gaming luminaries - everyone on early IRC was someone amazing and they were all accessible. That was before the masses even knew internet existed. And it was an entirely lawless space so you were free to explore and learn from anything.

I'm 27 and know some C#. Is it too late late to be a cool dude, or am I doomed to audit pajeet code if I dip into compsci now?

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You got to shitpost a reality TV star into the presidency though, which will cause all kinds of ripples throughout history forever and ever.
And you got to experience the wild west of the internet, before it goes on full lock-down. The wild west of the information age is a glorious time to be alive, and we are celebrating its twilight hours pretending every vidya is shit.
We deserve our fate.

I am a C# developer myself, started my programming career only a few years younger than you, so it's never too late if software engineering is what you have the heart for.

Pick up a book on .NET and download Visual Studio Community Edition for free. Learn all the basics and find an entry-level position doing some shitty coding. If you're cut out for it, you'll do well.

The wild west was in the early 2000s though

That sounds really cool and a lot like what I was thinking a good game could be like. Though all I can think of that could be similar to the game you described would be that one space game Holla Forums always plays or Rust. I'm sure most of you anons would consider me a newfag and I believe that my first introduction to games was anything after 2007. Hearing about a game with mechanics and freedom like the one you describe is like hearing the tales of a great epic from your grandfather, it seems so amazing and beautiful but you still have a nagging feeling in the back of your head that its too good to be true or couldn't have really happened. I would love to hear more stories about similar games or games from genres that don't even exist anymore. I can't imagine how hard it must be to see how far everything has fallen but I don't think its too late to give up all hope.

and with the death of net neutrality, whatever's left of the internet of this sort will be gone forever.
will there be a time when the net gets so fucked up by the cable companies that people will go back to bbs-ing people's mini-internets? would it be possible to form a new "undernet" by linking multiple bbs hosts?

A meshnet is entirely possible, even likely at this point.

At 27 it might be too late. Most of the people who are really good today were really good by 15. The brain loses its plasticity quickly and locks you into whatever path you've learned in your youth. When you have kids, remember this and don't let them waste their pre-teen years. That half A-press video kills me as that guy would have been an unbelievably good programmer if he had been programming rather than gaming as a kid.

No, you'll go through one of the greatest wild wests that has ever been seen. It's just not the one you'd have chosen. Silicon Valley is the right hand of the Israeli NWO and has been building out a 1984 worse than anything ever envisioned. Not only are they spying on you, they have everyone around you spying on you with open microphones and cameras feeding into their datacenters. They're building tech to identify what you think (this is being worked on openly right now by SV startups, presented as auto-moderation of 'toxic' groups and 'trolls'), and tech to correct the thoughts of those they identify as not thinking the right things (being worked on openly by the Mozilla Information Trust Initiative). By the time you've realized you need to fight them, it will be almost impossible as they will know who you are, who your friends are, have turned most of your friends against you, and you'll have given them so much power over your life that you can't act (your Google car will refuse to drive you to the protests). They poisoned the western world and it's going to either die or come close during your lifetime and it will be a hell on Earth that you never thought could happen. Surviving through that chaos will be the defining moment of your life, so start thinking about how you'll do it, how you'd fight them, and what they'll try to stop you.

Net Neutrality died more than a decade ago. The noise about it right now is manipulation. What you think went into law as Net Neutrality didn't prevent zero-rating or 'reasonable network management' so it was a sham law that did nothing that Net Neutrality was supposed to do, and the 'tiered internet' that people are currently warning could happen started happening legally many years ago. The companies right now crying about NN are the same ones that /massively/ abused zero-rating in the developing world to kill all local competition. You weren't told about this as the media didn't want you to know, and you ignored warnings of network guys telling you they were going to do this (I was called a telecom shill on reddit when I told them about plans to zero-rate traffic 5 years ago) but look into it now and be surprised about all the shit that they already did that the same people are warning will only happen after a repeal. Since that's all legal already they're just slowly acclimating the western market to it - this is the main reason they added caps some years back. The social media companies are crying about NN right now despite not actually caring about that law as this the beginning of the midterm push. The group behind that battleforthenet site (fightforthefuture) only activates for elections. You're being whipped into a frenzy and then will be directed to vote for certain candidates after the law is repealed and maybe also burn things. It's not about Net Neutrality, and you don't have Net Neutrality anyway no matter what decision is made. But ignore me as I must be a shill as I'm saying different things than you were told.

Meshnets as an internet replacement fundamentally do not work but I'm going to skip the technical side of that as I want to point out that dream is dancing around the actual problem: you have people in control of your network that are acting against you. Centralized authority has ceased to work for you in all things (telecom, government, religion, etc.) because you have lost control and you are not fighting to gain it back. You can't solve that problem with technology. There's a real fight there that has to take place if you want to survive, but it's going to be hard as you've been taught that centralized authority acting against you is normal, that it's impossible to fight it, and to fight ineffectively if you do.

Don't listen to this. How early you start has little to do with reaching your max potential if you're a natural-born software engineer. All too often I look at code from guys who are 10-15 years older than me and wonder how they go as far in the industry as they did.

Now I will say this: If you're just all like, "Welp, I know a little C#, so I guess I'll be a programmer" and you don't really have the talent then you will look like you're standing still next to these young puds right out of college. You have to truly want to do it if you want to succeed in the industry.

Think of a name of a great programmer. Then look up what they were doing in their teens.
Plasticity is not a social construct, it's biology. If you want to raise a piano prodigy, you start them on it when they're 4-6 years old. It works the same way with programming, although this is less acknowledged than with the piano for some reason.
But even if it might be too late for you, it is not too late to have a child and raise them as what you want to see. Don't think of your existence as just being your own life.

telecom shill

Not a BBS game, but does HellMOO live up too it's reputation?

As being full of goons? It was founded long after anyone of any value had left MUDs/MOOs. I don't think MOOs ever even had any value - it was where all the socializers went because they felt gameplay didn't belong in games. Essentially an early Second Life.

Well, I stumbled across pic related. Apparently the Pokemon autists are dedicated.

Nah, I mean it's reputation of allowing you to do all sorts of violent, gorey, and degerate shit. I don't know anything about it being full of goons though.

Fuck, apparently I can't proofread for shit right now.

Probably, as it was full of goons.

Not what I meant, but I see your point. I'm tempted to try it just to see if it really allows you as much freedom to wreak havoc as people say though.

Legend of the Red Dragon is the ultimate cuckold game. Literally every few days Violet takes another husband, and the players just trade her back and forth between them.

Trade Wars 2002 Master Race.

It still is, just less so than back then.
The west didn't change from duels at noon to commie central in a day either.
You'll wish the current Internet back in a decade, when your browser sends a digital ID with every message and you'll get arrested if you try to obfuscate it.

When I got my first computer, a used Escom High Tower in all-black, my friends brought along Descent and Raptor - Call of the Shadows.
Star Wars: X-Wing CD-ROM-Edition was the first game I legally bought with my own money (allowance).

Will we ever see a BBS made by anons for anons with the rise of issues regarding the risks of actually hosting, net neutrality, etc.? I doubt anybody would want to fuck with a BBS as long as we keep things on the down low. Sharing files would be cool too although it would have to be constantly moderated for obvious reasons.

Some user will suggest a BitTorrent based BBS with homegrown 1024-bit encryption and built-in tor client I'm sure.

It did and probably still has that freedom to fuck with people, but I don't think it's going to get back the same allure it had.
Goonshitte aside, it used to be pretty good as far as playability went. The earlier generation somehow managed to churn out a pretty decent atmosphere and with the sheer amount of infighting going on, so it didn't suffer the same way most goon-infested places did and do. The open-ended and underexplored nature of any additional mechanics usually meant that there was always a way to fight back. Superfuckers with end-level gear killing scrubs over and over? Get a few people together and hurl a volley of TVs at them from another tile. Accuracy was calculated differently, so you actually had a decent chance of hitting, possibly causing a knockout. So you take everything they're wearing and holding and either run away or go find a way of ensuring the equipment couldn't be stolen back. Things get patched, new things get added, and the cycle continued. And folks didn't take things as seriously. It was all part of the game.
But because they had a nice thing going on, the badmins decide to fuck with this established organic harmony to make the game more inclusive and accessible. They introduced "carebear" mechanics and a challenge system without fully thinking things through. In some circumstances, both you and your apartment-house-hideaway would be completely unassailable. There weren't too many things that could be done directly to other players that wouldn't nullify those perks for a short time. At that point, whoever delivered the first strike would be at a massive disadvantage. Attack one fucker and they, their entire corporation could and would have the option of killing you, breaking into your apartment and any door you had access to without too much of an option for retaliation.
This quelled the constant infighting into a cold war, which meant a lot of fighting took place between completely uneven combatants, and severely dampened the cycle of finding new tricks to get back at stronger players. Without the threat of being unexpectedly steamrolled by another big group, there was no incentive to be choosy or creative with griefing, to really make it worthwhile. Just storm in on weaker players, kill and walk away. No interaction beyond that.

If I recall correctly, they tweaked the challenge and carebear systems, but the damage to the general culture had already been done. Also, over the years, the newer generation of goonshitte took root. The one that takes the fight outside of the game, trying to persuade and schmooze the badmins, get on the staff and generally inflict the scourge that is SJWism on anything they touch. The usual conniving sophistry, lying and getting their often petty will by any means necessary.
Seeing SJWism in HellMOO was really fuckin' weird. Reminds me of how those kinds of politics and tolerance show up in the deepest dredges of degeneracy. The eternal violent schism between babyfur diaperfags and babyfur diaperfags who think Hillary wouldn't have been a very good president.

Fuck.

We're not hitchhiking anymore, we're riding. Anyone recall the fortune teller one?

That's been in talks in certain places, for a SHTF scenario.

Plenty of people start playing musical instruments in their teens or early 20s and do fine. You don't need to start in the single digits to git gud. Joe Satriani started playing guitar at 14, there are plenty of other examples.

I'm not paying long-distance fees just to fight you faggots on redial for an open com.

Telnet BBS still exit so it's all about getting them on meshnet.

Haha so lame, where are the graphics grandpa? Why is there no AA?

telnet eotl.org 2010 its the oldest continuously running MUD

Yes I did.