C-Net Developer's System ][ V2.5

[cube]

Allright, I've been talking about it in several threads before and mentioned it here and there, but here is a fresh, new, no beating around the bush post to address the topic head on:

I am looking for a good, working copy of C-Net Developer's System ][ Version 2.5.

I have several disks but I appear to be missing some files (For one thing, I only have a modem config file for the old style 1670 modem - dsp.Modem 2 - which does not appear to be workable into a telnet-able setup. As well, it appears my Local Mode programs are corrupt or from a different version (possibly the networking mods.) If you have any disks, files, images, d64's, d81's, cassette tapes, { Whatever } - Please let me know and please send them to me!

I have to believe that DS2 has survived out there somewhere. It was an awesome BBS program with lots of life and features when last I saw it in it's glory. All attempts of contacting Jim Selleck, the original author of DS2 and Michael Bendure, author and last known distributor of DS2 Network v3.04 and v3.1 have resulted in dead ends and inactive email accounts. Anything will help.

John

[cube]

Ok, I found and fixed the problem with my Local Mode file, but it's still proving to be a challenge with this one, incompatible modem config file.

Oh what fun...

John

[Pinacolada]

Hey Cube,

Selleck posted on a Yahoo group, 80sbbs, a while ago. I have a reply he made to someone about CNet (not sure whether it was DS2) detailing some of the things he had slated for CNet v13 (no, not a typo). I have it saved at home because I thought it was terribly interesting.

I don't know his email address offhand, but maybe if you joined the Yahoo group it'd give you the ability to contact him. I guess we need to find his user name first. I should be able to skim through and find it eventually. I lurk on that group, I thought about posting info about this forum to folks who were interested, or my BBS in general, but since I don't have Internet at home anymore, what's the point...

I'll see if I can grab the snippet. I seem to think in the back of my mind I posted it here on this forum at some point, but I might be wrong. Not sure how Jim would take it if I posted stuff here without permission though. I did write him once in regards to that reply he made, but can't remember whether I received a reply.

[cube]

Well, if is posted in a forum or a newsgroup, one would think it's fair game... If you Google or Yahoo specific phrases don't they both point you to archived newsgroups and forum postings? If it was something he posted on his own web site or sent you in an email, that falls into a different category. That and I'm now very interested to read it as well. Though strange as it may sound - I vaguely remember reading something about C-Net v13 at one point too, although the timetable in my mind seems to place it many years back, possibly on a BBS or something. Maybe I'm just dreaming stuff up but I vaguely remember a feature list planned for the next release but then there was the infamous split that formed Image. If you could find a way to contact Selleck I'd love to see if he'd sell me a complete copy of DS2 although I've just about got it working from the remains of what I have. It's just that derned modem file that's seeming to hold me up right now, because the BBS won't go to the "Waiting for Call" screen until the modem "Clears the line." This never happens because it keeps sending weird commands that come up all garbled in either a terminal or tcpser, [like] as though the baud rate was set wrong but I've tried every possible combination and tests from terminal programs in Vice come out fine, tests in DS2 are all garbled. I've got a Swiftlink cartridge coming though, so maybe on the real deal it will work better, although there again I would think I'd need a different modem config file again to allow DS2 to see and use the Swiftlink, so either way I'm screwed until I can find those modem files!

And to make it that much more tantilizing, they're only about 1-2 blocks big! Hahaha *sigh*

John

--{ I suffer from amnesia and deja vu at the same time... I think I've forgotten this before! }--

John

[Pinacolada]

Ok, well, if Jim finds out and gripes at me to take this down, I'll do so. I will try to scout out his email address from the Yahoo group member list at some point (y'should join the group, it's rather interesting at times, rather bland at others)...

[sorry about the crummy wrapping]

Hullo.

I found this group late last night while on my way to something else. Actually,
found Jason Scott's documentary site first and followed his link over. It's
really cool to see that the 80's BBS community is still kicking those days
around, however I'm not finding any lists on here that include people who ran or
remember CNet BBS for C=64.

Now THAT can't be right! We had hundreds of customers from all over the world,
but mostly in the US, and to this day I have yet to find a message threading
model anywhere on the internet that I like using better than the simple
Post/Response stream method we pioneered.

For the record, CNet v1-10 were written entirely by Ken Pletzer (with some
collaboration on v1). I took over and built v11.0 when Ken ported the system
over to the Commodore 128 and eventually to Amiga. My version 11.0 was 80%
Ken's code still with a lot of my ideas added in. 11.0 turned out to be
incompatible with a lot of the hardware add-on's and not universally stable on
the 3 different C-64 motherboard revisions (I had a lot to learn at that point)
so we eventually recalled 11.0 and replaced it with the stable v11.1a, which was
closer to 70% Ken's and 30% mine.

V11.1a was successful, but another programmer approached Ken with some fresh
ideas for a version 12, and he agreed to let that individual collaborate with
me. Well, at that time in my life I was not into collaboration, so I bowed out,
keeping my source code and my development notes to myself. CNet v12, therefore,
was almost entirely the work of Ken Pletzer and Don Gladden. Don used Ken's ML
code from v10 rather than my 11.1a ML, which I think was a step backward and a
mistake.

I don't know what happened between Don and Ken, but Ken asked me if I would be
interested in creating a v13, and Don Gladden took his ideas and released Image
BBS for C=64. I never looked at Image, but it is rumored that its first release
used Ken's ML without his permission. In any event, by the time Image hit v2 it
featured its own ML file.

I agreed to go back to CNet v11.1a and continue on the development lines I had
been following, mainly because v12 was based on the buggy and outmoded v10 ML
code and a lame BASIC overlay model that I had already left behind. Over the
next year, I entirely rewrote Ken's original code and created a new BASIC and ML
overlay model, which eventually became CNet BBS v11.6. Yes, we purposely
marketed the upgrade to v12 as v11.6. Our marketing slogan (and we had T-Shirts
made) was a math formula stating 11.6 is greater than 12 (11.6 > 12).

With CNet 11.6, the system became almost entirely my creation, about 85% mine
and 15% Ken's. Where Ken had built the v10 ML using an ML monitor, one byte at
a time (ouch!!) I had created an assembly language authoring system on my Amiga
computer, which was very sweet! Using that, I converted the old BASIC text
editor to ML and introduced my "Opus" editor, which freed up a bunch more space
for sysops to create BASIC overlay games for their users. That was part of
CNet's appeal: we had a developer's manual that allowed sysops with a modicum of
BASIC v2 programming knowledge to build their own games for their users. My ML
featured a structured kernal call table that remained the same through
subsequent revisions. There were no major revisions, just incremental updates
to do things like enable use of memory expander cartridges.

Somewhere along that line, I started to grow out of my stubborn resistance to
collaboration and began working with a gifted group of BBS enthusiasts and
programming gurus and we stared to envision a v13 that would have been really
incredible. We planned to make it mandatory to use a 512K memory expander and I
created new rules for writing ML so that all modules would be relocatable in
memory (taking a page from the Amiga). I designed a functional object model for
the v13 ML that had only the set of functions in RAM that were needed at any
given moment in the form of a Module Stack. In that way, using the RAM
expander, we had a virtual memory system for the C-64 that opened up new worlds.
I also had in mind an infinitely variable gaming system based around a database
model, and yes, that means that v13 would have been built around a database
rather than collections of text files as before.

Would have been... sad to say, v13 was never released. Some of its most
exciting features actually made it to testing. For example, we had the v13
Virtual Machine function actually WORKING. It made the C-64 work a little like
a Windows Remote Desktop of today. Only a few people ever saw this, and it
either totally blew their minds or they thought we were pulling some kind of
trick and it was fake. It was NOT fake. Here's how it worked: The sysop could
call his v13 system from remote and entered SYS at the main prompt. After
entering a special user name and password, he would see on his remote terminal
screen the familiar C-64 startup screen and the BASIC v2 prompt, and he would
actually be able to load, write, and save BASIC programs on the system from
remote. To do this we used a relatively conventional mainframe technique of
time slicing and memory/pointer swapping hooked into the IRQs with normal
screen/keyboard I/O rerouted through the modem via a VT emulator. We became
convinced that (in theory) a Commodore 64 would be able to handle two modems and
support two simultaneous callers with their own separate sessions using this
technique (although splitting the NMI's was a problem never totally addressed).
We considered a theoretical design where 10 C=64 computers could be hooked up
together to operate in tandem with a user port communication chain to create an
inexpensive true multi-line BBS based on CNet v13, and I believe it WOULD have
worked, only we all moved on to Amigas and we never tried.

Anyway... I hope that SOMEBODY out there has an interest in all of this ancient
history. The POINT is that we managed to build a serious BBS on a game machine
and eventually a lot of CNet 64 sysops started fooling users into thinking they
were using IBM boxes. That was possible because 11.6 featured an on-the-fly
text reformatting feature that would take messages typed in 40 columns and
present them to callers using wider screens in 80 columns. People used to call
me and say that some users would refuse to believe that their BBS was running on
a C-64.

Jim Selleck
- still out there
www.SPFilms.us

Holy cow, I forgot about his web site. *clicky* Ooo... may be able to contact him through that!

Re: the modem driver, why not just patch it temporarily to skip over the detect routine? Is it written in BASIC?

[cube]

I tried that, and it gets to the Waiting for Call screen, but then when you go to enter Local Mode, it sends an 'ath' to the modem (presumably to take it off the hook while you're on the BBS) but quickly resets the modem, clears the line and returns to the Waiting for Call screen. I may need to figure out what to poke in order to make it think the modem is off the hook during that time. Interestingly enough, the code for this is in the main BBS program (cn), not the modem file.

Still working on it...
John

[Pinacolada]

Hmmm. That sucks. Well, mind if I take a stab at whistling in the dark, so to speak? What I usually do when dissecting a BASIC program is use petcat to dump the listings to text files, and print them out and put lots of nice little remarks to myself...

Thinking of using vicetops (www.pdbuchan.com/commodore/vicetops.html) to make a nice little printout without weird symbols in it. Might be worth looking into...

What did you think of the post? All that trouble and nary a peep (teasing)

[cube]

I'll have to try that. I emailed Jim Selleck this morning so we'll see what (if any) reply I get back.

John

[cube]

Well, after a couple of emails with Jim, I'm starting to have serious doubts that DS2 will be seen in operation again unless someone else out there has a [Full] copy of it in their basement or attic. He's not even sure HE has a copy of the program, and if he does, it may be so well burried that light of day will not shine upon it again. Speaking with him also reminded me of one other important detail pertaining to his software and the fact that it had never worked right for me: I had a copy, more specifically - an 'illegal' copy - of the software but the reason it did not work was not because of a [bad] copy but because the original software only works when you have a special Dongle attached to one of your joystick ports! I knew this at the time, but had long since forgotten about it until he mentioned removing the dongle routines from the program. So in short, even if I DID have a full set of disks and files, A: It would not run in an emulator, and B: It wouldn't even run on real hardware unless one of these Dongles could be found.

Another lifelong dream incurs a serious stab wound...

John

[Golan Klinger]

Are you sure it was a joystick port dongle? I know of a few programs that used a cassette port dongle which could be easily circumvented. A joystick port dongle would be equally easy to defeat. Does he remember any details about the dongle? It would save a lot of trial and error.

[cube]

I remember seeing one once and it was in fact a joystick port dongle. He's not sure if any of the source code has survived all these years and said if he WAS able to find it, he be happy to remove the dongle code at this stage in the game, but unfortunately it does not sound like he is very interested in digging it out.

[Pinacolada]

Well, shucks! Umm... I don't know much about coding, but y'know what the guys are saying over in the DTV hacking forum about "fixing" games to work on the DTV? Basically looking for any references to memory locations 56320/56321 (joystick ports). Couldn't one disassemble the code and put NOPs in those areas...?

Just a clueless newbie trying to put his two cents in.

[cube]

I'll post the disks if anyone wants to take a stab at it... I never did get a chance to do any ML programming although I always wanted to learn. One of my demo-coding friends was going to teach me some things but never got around to it. Tell me, (this question makes glaringly obvious my ignorance on the subject) - What's the difference between Assembly and Machine Language?

John

[wiskow]

I own an original copy of a BBS program called Sequel BBS (currently on loan to Bo Zimmerman for addition to his site). It, too, uses a joystick port dongle to operate. Somehow, I've managed to not lose the thing over all these years. Anyway, the dongle is just a small black cube that connects to the joystick port. Bo says he's going to try his hand at duplicating it...

-Andrew

[Golan Klinger]

cube said:

What's the difference between Assembly and Machine Language?

Machine language is the processor's native language whereas assembly language is a series of mnemonics for machine language instructions. Machine language is expressed either in binary or hexadecimal where as assembly looks (slightly) more like English which makes it easier to remember.

Does that make sense? You could always join us in the SSoCC message board for more indepth explanations.