🛩 A new door game in 2o23?!

If you’re a certain vintage of the 80s and 90s, you may remember BBSes and Door Games. Some of the most popular doors included Tradewars 2002, Legend of the Red Dragon, The Pit and many others. Well low and behold, both BBSes and even door games are still around today!

We’ve found a r0ckstar of a developer, aNACHRONiST of aBSINTHE BBS, that is developing an awesome combat role playing game in which you play a World War II veteran serving as a pilot in the US Navy during the Korean War. Skyraiders is a result of years of constant development in the AREXX programming language and Amiga Topaz character graphics. Originally inspired by a print & play game - Skyraiders over Korea by Patrick Millin. Patrick gave both blessing and insight to the Skyraiders door game project.

When you first play the game, it feels like a turn based arcade title - but you quickly realize that aNACHRONiST has a lot m0re in store for us… not only do you get to play as a pilot - the game diverges by asking the player to lead some ground operations. While this is completely inaccurate historically, it gives the player a comprehensive Korean War combat experience to include both land and air missions.

In between missions, you’re able experience life on the carrier, adjust gear, find Easter Eggs and learn different game play features. The game plays thru 25 missions - and you’ll quickly realize that the choices you make greatly affect the outcome of your missions. You’ll attack enemy positions, dogfight with enemy pilots and choose the artillery, ace feats and items that will get you thru them… and don’t forget the Ground Missions!! Ground Missions allow you to choose and lead a team of soldiers while attempting to rescue POWs and higher ranking officers… you’ll have to make choices and fight enemy troops in order to doso.

Another great ‘feature’ of the game is the artw0rk. All graphics are completely made up from the Amiga Topaz character set and designed by aNACHRONiST himself.

If you’d like to see the Tech Heart full (almost!) play-thru of Skyraiders, you can watch below… please be advised that I get into the game - some language may or may not be offensive. Sorry, not sorry.

(PS; if you want to know how to get on BBSes, and even play SkyRaiders for yourself, check after the video for details on how to do just that!!!)

☎ So you wanna call bbSes & play Door Games?

Bulletin Board Softwares were the first to allow computers to connect to each other, by using a modem. A BBS was a computer that ran BBS software and listened for calls. When a user dialed in, the BBS would answer and allow them to login and then access its services - including Door Games. Now-a-days most BBSes allow these connections using either TELNET or SSH… lets show you how to do that in 2o23. Since this article was about Skyraiders, we’ll use its WHQ - aBSINTHE BBS as the example…

You’ll need a BBS-compatible terminal software. The most popular are:

SyncTERM / Netrunner / My fTelnet

SyncTERM is the most compatible terminal as it supports ANSI, ASCII, PETSCII and even Atari character sets. Netrunner is also very popular and looks great because its fonts are anti-aliased; this both makes them look great, but not completely historically correct. My fTelnet is a web-based software and while it allows for quick BBSing w/o installing software, the results aren’t always PERFECT. While there are downloadable binaries for both SyncTERM and Netrunner on Windows and Linux, Ubuntu/Debian users will have to compile SyncTERM themselves… I highly suggest this how-to so compiling SyncTERM goes easily while making sure to get all prerequisites. If you’re on Arch Linux, SyncTERM is in the aur and can be installed with yay if you use it; “yay -S syncterm”.

Now that you have SyncTERM or Netrunner installed, add an entry with the aBSINTHE BBS details.

[absinthebbs.net:1940] (1940 is the TELNET port number.)

Notice in SyncTERM above you enter the port separetly; while in Netrunner you 
use a :

Once you have aBSINTHE added to the dialing directly, just smash ENTER and you’ll be connected to aBSINTHE - you’ll be prompted to press ESC twice, which is an effort to keep bots/scripts at bay, and finally dropped to the matrix login screen. From here you can highlight the “NEW USER” tab and create an account. Us BBS sysOps aren’t to terribly worried about ‘correct information’, but we usually like to have a good email address. One fun bit here is that you’ll have to choose a HANDLE… back in the day these were big business - be sure to pick something wicked cool. After creating an account and getting thru the login process, you can simply type “skyraiders” from the Main Menu; you can also navigate to the ‘Absinthe Arcade’ (option 3)… while yer here, be sure to checkout Skullhack - another door game by aNACHRONiST!

⚡ 0ther w0rlds . . .

If yow found yourself bitten by the bbS bug, be sure to checkout these other top notch bbSes:

[20ForBeers.com:1337   ] 					2o fOr beeRS

[bbs.erb.pw:23         ] 					Quantum Wormhole

[conchaos.synchro.net  ]					Constructive Chaos

[bbs.retrohack.se:64128] 					Frozen Floppy C-64

Please notice below - Frozen Floppy is a Commodore 64 BBS… we’ll have to select the correct screen mode so its PETSCII graphics display correctly. There’s a w0rld of BBS types and softwares to discover… you can find a list of every active BBS at The Telnet BBS Guide if you want to find m0re!!!

TechHeart.life