CWK BBS
Cold Winter Knights BBS
An Atari ST Citadel-style BBS
Current Version: STingadel 1.06
(As of 2007Aug01)
History
Mission
Progress
Bug Fixes/Additions
E-mail me!
Log in Now!
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BBS STATUS: DOWN as of 2007Oct01
History and Background
Welcome to the web site of Cold Winter
Knights BBS and the STinGadel Atari ST Telnet-based BBS software system.
Cold Winter Knights ("CWK") BBS was originally an old
Sacramento, California-based Atari ST
Citadel-style
modem-dialup BBS running on an "STadel" variant
called Inner Sanctum. In its heyday of the summer
of 1990, it had on the
order of 60-70 logins per day and over 100 active
users -- quite a heady thing, considering the
locality that is inherent of a dial-up BBS.
CWK first went on-line in May of 1988, running
primarily as a Role-playing game BBS: at its
most-popular point in that morph,
it was running 11 different RPGs with
six distinct game-masters.
After evolving through very distinct phases (and
associated user bases), by its end, it had waned to
about 50 calls a week and a core of about 20-25
users. Ultimately, once the Internet became a
household name, Dial-up BBsing in general lost its
appeal and in February of
1996, the original Dial-up version of Cold Winter Knights was closed down.
Mission: STinGadel
Fast-forward five years... In 2001, the person who has the distinct
credit of naming Cold Winter Knights (one Dylan
Carlson, aka "Axis of the North") e-mailed me and
told me of his telnet-able citadel bbs,
"Retrovertigo" (Now since defunct.) I was
intreagued, and of course logged in. Sure enough,
the old heady days of
(G)oto (N)ew (E)nter came roaring back to me.. And I
found that I wasn't the only citadel-er that was
still around. Half of my final old base was
still into the Citadel scene, in the new
Internet version of the Citadel boards.
Naturally, I soon dreamed of being able to put Cold
Winter Knights back up. But there was a problem:
all the citadel proggies currently in-use were
Linux based -- the distinct realm of pentium and
Mac PCs. I wouldn't want to do it at *all* if I
couldn't use the Atari ST - it just wouldn't
seem natural!
Enter the wonderful world of ancient-tech hardware
hacking! I soon discovered that there was a way to
have an ethernet
connection on the Atari ST! (Yes,
no shit!) All I'd have to do is build said hack,
get a constant static IP address, re-write the BBS
software to work with telnet instead of modem
connections, and we'd be in business!!!
"Oh, is that all? Hell, piece of cake, that!!!"
Thus began Mission: STingadel. STing comes from the
Atari ST's TCP/IP stack.. After successfully getting the EtherNEC working and a few weeks of fairly constant programming, ripping out old code, and finally just re-building the whole bloody software from scratch, I was telnetting into my Atari
ST, logging in, reading and writing messages! STinGadel was born!!
Where I am in its
development
- The lovely thing about the mid-2000s is that there are emulators available everywhere, and the STEem is the one I use. I can power it up to a meaty 128-MHZ ST and do all my programming on it. Sweet!! Also lovely, is that because I ue Fedora Core 6 as my mainbase operating system, I can easily build a PPP server on it which the emulated Atari ST can connect to, and poof - I can actually test telnetting into the emulated version of my BBS software. I don't even need to take the board down while I'm working on it, or testing it. Gotta love the 2000s if you're a propellerhead!!
- I am working on it off-and-on now as of 2007Aug01. I like to switch between a few hobbies (and a few other ones really sucked me in the last year and a half, between my brick barbecue, our backyard, Magic the Gathering Online, some Ultima Online, some electronics projects, etc..). I can't guarantee how fast anything will be done, but i'm at least back to being interested in working on it again. ;)
- One of the electronics projects I would like to complete is the quite-cool Atari ST-based product, the SatanDisk. That would allow me to not have a loud, hot, ancient (17 years old!) Atari ST hard drive going on all the time. It's *gotta* break down eventually, and the SatanDisk sounds like the perfect, absoltuely silent solution. Plus, it's a fun geeky electronics project to do! :)
Contact
I can be e-mailed (Actual e-mail address removed from main text due to all the friggin' spam e-mail harvesters that have crawled over this thing. To all those assholes who do that, here's some nice e-mails that you can use...)
I
hate
spammers
Alternatively, I am also available on occasion in ICQ (ICQ# is 12223860,
under the name of "Toothy/YD/Shniz"), and on Lambdamoo as
YD
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