Why I'm doing this
I ran boards from 1985 to 1997. My first was Fido, and like most SysOps I tried just about every BBS package there was.
Nostalgia sent me looking a while back, and I found the boards still out there, some on modern operating systems and some in DOSBox. But every one needs a server with a fixed address that somebody has to keep alive, and every caller has to hunt down a terminal program and then work out how to connect. Old-timers like me put up with that because we always have. New people don't bother, and a hobby that stops getting new people dies.
What a waste. Retro is everywhere. BBSes are a real piece of computing history, and they're still fun, especially the door games.
So I wrote ATDT, a BBS in PHP that looks and works like the boards I remember, on shared hosting that costs a few dollars a month. Then I got the original 16-bit DOS doors running inside it: LORD, TradeWars, The Pit, Usurper, fully multi-user, nothing DOS on the server. Then I got an entire DOS BBS running as a door (Renegade, for the curious), and that became ATA, which installs the unmodified classic boards in one click and lets anyone call them from a browser.
Plenty of callers never cared about the message bases or the file areas. They called for LORD. So I pulled the DOS machine out on its own: ATO Doors runs the classic doors straight from a web page, with no board around them.
That's two ways to run a board and two ways to skip it: one for the whole shelf of classic doors, and one for the game I couldn't leave alone, Usurper, rebuilt in PHP with the old exploits fixed.
And every board needs art. The ANSI editor I built into ATDT now stands on its own as ANSI Paint, a TheDraw-style editor that runs in any browser.
It's a hobby project and it's all free, so go call the demo board and leave me a oneliner.
:: Ariel