How to access the BBS

My old Ringworld BBS will be up and running at Acorn World this weekend.

We would love as many people as possible to access it, and leave us a message!

There are two main ways of accessing the BBS.

1. Dial-up, just as you did back in the 1980s!
You will need a viewdata terminal, or a BBC Micro, Modem and communications software such as CommSoft or Commstar, or some sort of viewdata terminal software and modem for your PC.

Once set-up, the magic telephone numbers to access the BBS are 0161 660 8192 or 020 7099 2934 for line 1 and line 2. If one is engaged, try the other. (I know that those are Manchester and London numbers, but they both terminate in a box I can plug-in anywhere I want!)


2. Telnet access. If you already have access to a terminal program that supports viewdata, simply point it at uko.irrelevant.com port 6400.

Alternatively, you can download a pre-configured copy of BeebEm for Windows all set-up to run CommSoft and connect to the BBS here. Simply unzip it to anywhere on your PC (I suggest c:\BeebEmDialer) and run the RUNME.BAT file! This will fire off a couple of windows and finish off by dialing into the BBS! If you are using Vista, you will probably get authorisation messages, just click "Continue". If you need to re-dial, press f3. f0(f11 in BeebEm) brings up the help screen.

I think this BeebEm is configured with beeb-style keys, so * is on shift-@. If you want to use the star on the 8 key, select Options>Logical Keyboard Mapping!

Login with your name, and have a look around. Press numbers to select the options, *aw# to access information about the BBS a the show, and *bye# when you have finished! # is usually available on your return key if using a computer.

We would appreciate if if you could goto *bb.3# and leave a message for all to see!


Both access methods will be kept available as much as possible from now until the end of the show on Sunday 13th September 2009. Watch this space for what happens afterwards. I cannot guarantee 100% uptime; we're running on 25yo hardware here, and the BeebEm implementation isn't perfect yet either, throwing up occasional errors, but please persevere with us! ...

See you online!

Hicups and Hostings

Ok.  Part of my retrochalllenge entry was to get the viewdata website sorted out - it's been in the process of being Wikified for over a year now!  Some of the work involved in that relates to simply translating the article markup from one markup language to another, but it also means I need to re-write all my custom plugins too.  And to do that, I need to finish the re-write of the viewdataviewer code... and holding me back on all of this was a webhost that made everything behave as if I was walking through molasses whenever I tried to change anything..   It used to be pretty good, but as with all shared webhosts, seems to have become oversubscribed and slowed to a crawl as a result.  Add in a good stir of never-updates, some virus infections, and I should have waved them goodbye a long time ago!

Anyway, I've taken the plunge and shifted my hosting... I'm now renting a VPS which means I'm effectively in control of my own server (albeit merely a tiny part of someone else's system) but I can keep everything up to date, and I don't have to worry about somebody else letting a virus in.  It's very nippy, compared to the previous host anyway, so I'm satisfied.  Maybe I'll not see visitors getting fed up waiting for the next page, now .. (how they would have coped at V23 speeds I do not know ...)

As of yet, there's no new content (although I've got a little titbit waiting to be released - thanks Ant) but that's because it's taken about a week to get everything shifted over - there's 17 websites to deal with! Most are placeholders or simple html-only things, but there are a few complicated ones.  But everything seems to work.. phew.... now to concentrate on more interesting things...

The other part of the challenge is re-working the hardware running the BBS.  This, I might not manage.  Rather than tidying up the mess in the photo, it's got worse!  I had to move everything on the left over in order for a surveyor to examine the floor joists - back in 2008 we got a builder in to put in a "proper floor" and better access, so we could actually use the space, among other things.   Unfortunately, he turned into one of those cowboys you see on the TV, and did a job that nto even the worst DIY nut would be proud of.  There's a lot more to tell, which I'll no doubt blog about eventually, but there's a chance we might finally get some of it sorted soon.  This, unfortunately, will mean packing everything up from up there while it's done, making it impossible to do the BBS side of things.

Fun with terminals

Christmas bought me a little present -

It's a HOBS branded, Philips NMS 6302 viewdata terminal. Very dinky and sweet, and working perfectly! This is a pretty late model, built in 1990, compared to most of my other terminals. It says "Made in France" on the bottom, mentions Minitel, and therefore supports Teletel, Teletel Pad X3 and ASCII services too! Pity it's monochrome.. This would however be really cute to have on my desk, were I a high powered executive working in the 1990s...

As you might be able to tell, it's currently viewing the main Prestel Messaging index, page 7a. This is courtesy of my viewdata BBS, which it has given me a bit of incentive to try and get back online. (It's very very flakey at the moment but if you fancy tying it out, there's a single line sometimes-working on 03333 403311.. Key *Prestel# to jump out of the BBS and back in time, at least for a moment... ) I'm intending to re-work this in time, using the better modems and terminal servers to allow internet access too. It is, however, a wonderful trip down memory lane seeing these pages trickling down at 1200bps again!

Retrochallenge 2013

In a fit of madness, I decided to re-enter this years competition.

If you cast your mind back, I entered last time with the intention of sorting out my "man cave" as the attic was described, in order to get the viewdata BBS back up and running.

Unfortunately, building work interrupted matters, and I didn't get very far.   More unfortunately, the building work stalled, and I still don't have a safe floor up there, so pretty much everything is still in boxes.  A year on.  The tale of what happened and what went wrong is going to make a great story at some point, but not yet.

So, this year, I've been hoping to get something working under emulation.  The ideal would be an emulated modem that can answer VoIP phone calls, and pass the user to an emulated server of some sort.  Modems and VoIP are reckoned not to work very well, but that's the "modern" types. V23 has no problem at all, as I proved when using the real stuff over it.

The trick is going to get a software modem working at such a slow speed!  IAXmodem uses SpanDSP, which proports to support the old FSK modems, including V23, but I've not yet managed to get it working.  Part of the issue is that the whole thing is geared up for faxing, so assumes some level of intelligence from the far end.  V23 modems, particularly the 25 year old ones, don't do anything intelligent!

So, that's the task this month.  Getting iaxmodem (initially) to answer a call from an ancient terminal.  Then I'll hook it up to a BBC micro emulator and run the BBS entirely virtually.

I'm acutely concious that over half the month is over, and I've not done anything yet!

Long term goal is to find a backup of the original Prestel software and databases, run up a GEC mini-computer emulator, and actually run the real thing.  But so far that's been elusive.  Anybody know of any surviving discs or tapes from Prestel itself?

Retrochallenge

OK.. I'm going to try and get something done for Retrochallenge 2012 :-)

 I'm currently a year into a redesign of viewdata.org.uk, so will try and finish that.

 I'll also try mend a couple of machines and get the viewdata BBS connected back up to the Internet.
 (This is running on BBC Micros and Magic Modems from the 1980s - you can still telephone it ...)

 I might have to finish rebuilding the hobby room so I'll have space to do this...

Follow this specifically using the retrochallenge tag on this blog.

With luck, I'll at least get something part way done in the time.... :-)

A Viewdata Host

One of my aims when setting up viewdata.org.uk was to create a means by which readers could experience connecting to a viewdata service, and also to use such to present what saved pages we had in an appropriate context.

Sadly, there was nothing available that I could find that would allow me to run an actual host, and although I had some success firing up my old BBC Micro based viewdata BBS, this didn't last long due to multiple hardware failures.

Back up to today, and, as I mentioned yesterday, John Newcombe has written, and is running, his own viewdata host called TELSTAR.   I've discussed some things with John, and had been hoping to blag a copy of the software, but it seems that it's not quite what I am looking for.

Now, I have been building up a database of frames - this is yet another unfinished project - over at db.viewdata.org.uk.   This database is what I want to use as the source of the data for a host system.
Although it's mostly got teletext loaded up, I do have a complete copy of the PC Plus demo of Micronet loaded up, which can act as a starting point.

So, what to do?  Well it's obvious, write my own host software.  I've been putting this off for years, but, it's #retrochallenge time, and I do want to achieve something...

A few hours last night got the bare bones sorted out, and a bit of time debugging, and we're at a point where I can dial in and navigate between pages!  Woo!

Whereas John has been concentrating on content for his viewdata host, I'm going to be working on making mine more of a "Prestel Emulator"; it should feel as close to the original as possible.  I've a lot to do, obviously, but not bad for an few hours work.

Modem Emulation - an RC2018/09 prologue

Most of you will know by now that I'm really into preserving the memory of Prestel and Viewdata systems generally.  I run www.viewdata.org.uk which, while a bit long in the tooth, is going to get a massive update "soon" ...   But today I'm going to talk about hardware.

Some time back, I fired up my old viewdata BBS "Ringworld" - this operated on a collection of BBC Micros - one per connected user - and an Acorn A5000 acting as fileserver.  I connected these to the internet using a motly selection of modems, ATA telephony adapters, and serial terminal adapters.

The long shot was, for a user dialling in, the call was answered either by the exact same modem it always had been, connected to a SIP ATA - the digital data was transformed to analogue, before being turned back to digital by the modem.  This always seemed like a poor idea to me. What would be better is if some bit of software answered that digitised telephone call, looked at the whistles and warbles, and turned it directly into a sequence of ASCII bytes for delivery to a telnet port.

I had found an program called iaxmodem that allowed an asterisk based PBX to emulate a modem, but it was focused on faxing, and I just couldn't get it to work with the V23 dial-up I wanted.  But it was close.   I spent the next few years, off and on, searching for changes to that, or SIP based alternatives, with no luck.

In the meantime, John Newcombe decided to write his own viewdata host service, called Telstar, in Python, and that can be accessed via a raw-socket. (like telnet, but without the features!)  There's not a lot of software out there that can talk both Viewdata display protocols and connect to a socket, however.  Richard Russell wrote a example viewdata client that could do it, and you can connect from BeebEm if you load up a suitable comms package and set the RS423 IP parameters. 

There have also been a couple of projects to produce a "WiFi Modem" that, basically, looks like a hayes-compatible modem that you connect to via RS232, but it in turn connects to your WiFi, and onwards to a telnet port out on the internet.  This is great for things like BBC Micros, Commodore 64s, etc., where you can just swap out your period modem for this new device.   Not so good for dedicated terminals, or e.g. the ZX Spectrum VTX5000 where the modems are built in.

Then, out of the blue, an old friend, Darren Storer, posted on the BBC Micro facebook group (I think it was there..) that he'd set up a dial-up number for Telstar, and could people test it.  It took me a week or two to get there, but I pulled out a terminal, dialled the number ... and it didn't work.  Not at all.  I did, however find out the software he was using ...  asterisk-Softmodem.  This was exactly the sort of project I'd been looking for all those years.  But, it didn't work for him/

I pulled the code and had a look, and could see nothing wrong.  So, firing up an asterisk server, and installing it, I tried to debug.  The first issue was my terminal was not locking onto the carrier, so I added a t(-10) to increase the volume, and that sorted that!

Next problem, I wasn't getting much data on screen - many characters were just missing!   This was somewhat easy to diagnose, as I had an inkling after seeing how you configured asterisk to use softmodem - you specified the number of data bits, being between 5 and 8.  The example had it as 8. Now Prestel, and of course the terminals, all used 7 bits with even parity. What I was seeing was the terminal being sent 8-bit data, and of course interpreting that as most of the characters having an incorrect parity bit, and ignoring those!

Now, I can set a software terminal to 8bit data, but not the termnal - there  is very little you can configure as a user on these things.  Because the project had no support for parity it looked like a dead end, but that wasn't going to stop me - I'd waited years to find this, and wasn't going to give up now!

Delving into the code, it actually turned out to be a nice simple and straightforward bit of programming.  Adding parity support turned out to be fairly easy... I've published the modifications to my own github fork and submitted a pull request to send them back to the original author.

So now, I can dial into Telstar, CCL4, or anywhere I want to set up a number for!

If you want to try it, the number for Telstar is 0333 340 3311 (from outside UK, +44 333 340 3311). Calls cost the same as an 01 or 02 and are included in any inclusive minutes you may have. Call s are free for A&A customers.)

I can't guarantee that number will stay up, and it may not work from time to time if I'm tweaking things, but if it turns out useful to you, please let me know in the comments below!

Nothing to report

It's been a busy few weeks. Kids broken up from school, house to tidy, and another week coming up where I have to completely box up and remove everything in the attic in order that the floor can be sorted out. I've already moved out a lot of stuff in there, but there's a heck of a pile remaining - mostly the stuff which wasn't already in conveniently sized stackable storage crates!  I've also had no end of other things to sort out that has been taking up an inordinate amount of time, plus all the trivial stuff that doesn't take long but seems to keep building up.  So lots of late nights and early mornings and which only makes me tired and slows me down further.

Throw in the odd random day out and this means, of course, that I've done virtually nothing on the retrochallenge entry - I keep promising myself a day on it, reworking the BBS side anyway, but it's not happened yet.  Maybe today ... there are still a couple of days of July left!  And then it can all go into boxes too...   On the plus side, when all the work is done, I'll be able to unbox it and set everything up much neater - but that won't be for another month or so at the very least, so outside the time limit.

Watch this space ...

Making old data visible, easily!!

Many years ago I was heavily involved in the viewdata industry - working for Micronet 800 and then producing software for other Prestel ISPs, running my own viewdata BBS, etc. I therefore accumulated rather a lot of viewdata pages, and managed to recover these from an old backup a few years ago.

As part of a separate project, Vewdata.org.uk I wanted to display these images. As they were saved using a BBC Micro, I loaded them up in a BBC Micro Emulator, under Windows, took a screen capture, pasted that into Photo Editor, cropped it, saved it out as a GIF, and finally uploaded it to the web server. I then had to add the image to whichever gallery it belonged in. As you can guess, this is fairly labour intensive, and gave rather variable results.

Being a firm believer in "let the computer" do the work, I started this side project to condense all this into as little work as possible. What I wanted to acheive was to reduce the steps to: 1. Upload original saved screen file to the web server. 2. End.

I think this has now achieved this, and more so! There are currently two scripts in the suite - vl.php (viewdata lister) will scan a given directory and construct a web page bsaed on the files it finds. vv.php is used as an image source for each file, and this reads the files and constructs a PNG or animated GIF, as appropriate, and returns it to the client.

As a side-benefit of having the original save file available, it's also possible to provide a text-only version of the frames! I hope this will make things more search-engine friendly.

You can find the files here.

At the time of writing, you can find a sample page here that shows the results that can be acheived for a random selection of pages from Prestel, Teletext and some LAN based services.

Please add any comments or suggestions below.

Sorry

Just a quick note to apologise for not actually getting to RR and for no BBS. I had some family issues, compounded by my not planning to be away well enough.

I'm absolutely gutted not to have been there, and so sorry to everybody expecting me. It seems that Dave didn't get my message, either, which didn't help. I'll do better next time!!

The Ringworld BBS

We're getting closer to a fully working system. Well, I've less than a week before Acorn World when it's got to be on show!



Here you see three Beebs all up and running the host. I just need to find another plug for the second modem, but the first is up and running. It's a little untidy, sorry, but I've been busy building master battery packs !!

If anybody wants to try dialing in, the number is 0161 660 8192. 1200/75 V23 and viewdata mode ! I can't promise 24/7 availability, but it'll be up as much as I can until the show, then during it of course.

Telnet access details to follow ..

It only took 20 years...

Back in the 1980s, the computer I used pretty much exclusively was the BBC Micro.  I had written a fair bit of software for it, including two products sold commercially, and a number of items I was commissioned to write.  I ran two dial-up bulletin boards and a moderated chatline/forum thing on Prestel. I was a committee member of ClubSpot 810, responsible for the BBS listings, and was employed by Micronet 800 in the Technical Help Department.

Most of what I did at home, including a multi-line viewdata bulletin board, was run from an "Econet" network I had at home.  Using a slightly modified BBC Master ET and a 10MB hard disc. (Yep, ten megabyte... I've got nearly a million times more space on the home LAN now!)  It used to take over 30 floppy discs to back-up, and the external drive unit was almost the size of a Mini-tower PC today!

By the end of 1989 and after two house moves, a new family and a full time job, most of the Beeb stuff was packed up and in boxes.  Over 15 years later, in about 2006, after two further moves, with nostalgia in my mind, some of it got unpacked again.   The hard disc seems to be unwilling to perform any more, but I did still have some backups.  In odd moments over the next year, and with an A5000 obtained from Freecycle running as a filesever, I managed to get a network up and running again between a stack of machines balanced on an overly small desk, and after a few false starts, restored a backup set!  Then we found out we were having a baby, and all time for tinkering stopped.

Three years later, with the addition of an ethernet card in the A5000, and much help from members of the BBC Micro mailing list, I got IP working and the A5000 on the LAN.  Unfortunately I was unable to find any SMB, FTP or NFS server software for the A5000 that would run on the RISC OS 3.1 A5000 , so nothing would actually talk to it.

In steps a RISC PC... It only took three days of snatched minutes here and there to get it to log into the Econet server across the ethernet.. and I finally had a machine that the riscos samba server would work on.  It crashes a LOT, so it's going to be unuseable, so I'm going to have to try another protocol, but at least it's a start: I mapped a drive on one of the PCs, and was able to list the directory!

So, over 20 years since I was last able to properly access this data, it looks like it's going to be available again!

I'm thinking that I'll have to move it all from the A5000 onto the RISC PC, and run the econet fileserver on there, then just use the A5000 as a gateway between the econet and the ethernet -that way I don't need to have both machines on as much - most of the time I'm going to want to be accessing it from a PC.

Once that's all done - next task is to sniff some of the AUN traffic (econet over ethernet) and adjust BeebEm's econet support to use that protocol - it will be rather cool to have an emulated BBC Micro talking to a real one across the networks!

Finally!

Finally, after canablising and repairing motherboards of three dead A5000s I now have a working fileserver again! At last I can get on with the important tasks in life - getting set up to run a viewdata BBS up at the Acorn World show up in Huddersfield next month.

There will be intermittant access to it in the run up period; if anybody wants to re-live the glory days of being online in the 1980s, then watch this space for access details.

(And for those reading this on Facebook, click "view original post" below to get to the actual blog entry..)

Econet woes..

I've posted before about my problems getting the old-style Econet back up and running. I'm still having problems.

I'm also limited by the machines I have available to test things out with...

BUT so far, I've got the following working.

• Station 103, a Model B. This one one of the ones I obtained recently. Along with my 6502dvd second processor this is running a Level 2 fileserver.
  
• Station 101, a Model B, pretty vanilla. This is one of my original machines that ran the BBS 20 years ago.
  

Both of these are working fine, talking to each other quite hapilly.

And because I now have a known working pair of machines, I can now determine that...

• at least one of the cables I was using to test things with, doesn't work.
  
• the Master 128, station 40, I was running the fileserver on before will only occasionally see station 103, giving variouslly Net Jammed, Not Listening or Not Present errors.
  
• the A5000 still can't see anything, nor anything it. Since I swapped over the econet modules in this and Station 40, it looks like both may be dead.
  
• ..as might be a loose module I tried, which came loose in a box along with two others, one badly repaired, and a pile of chis... I don't like swaping them about in Stn 40, though, as it's under a replay board that I have to take out first.
  
• a Master 128 from the recent haul behaves exactly the same ...
  

So, I've got two Model Bs working, but nothing later. If I had at least one Master that was working 100%, then I could start swapping modules about to test them.

The only other econet-fitted machines are a Master with no battery pack (well, it DID have one, but it was a bit of a mess, and the keyboard has lots of dead keys anyway..) and a German Model B which has a dead PSU.

Time to drag out the other Masters that don't have econet fitted, see if I can get any of the modules working. After that, it's time to desolder the line drivers..

Sigh...

Retrochallenge: Starting position..

The Attic

Well here we are.  My starting position at getting the viewdata BBS sorted out..

Top shelf - misc DIY stuff, but there's a spare electron shoved in there.

Middle shelf - two VoIP adapters & firewall, elderly modem rack, two terminal servers running off old PC power supplies since theirs died, and a NAS box and external USB drives that is nothing to do with this!

Bottom shelf - ancient mono monitor, three BBC Micros, two magic modems, quad-video switch.

On the floor: various spare beebs and ARM machines....

On the right, another two beebs, a Tandata viewdata adapter sat in a touchscreen for a CUB, atop a portable TV, and lots of more stuff!

At present, in use: one VoIP box adapter, the magic modems, and two beebs.

Out of shot is an Acorn A5000 which runs the econet fileserver and a RISC PC, sharing an old 14" monitor.

Previously, I did have two beebs on modems and two beebs connected to one of the terminal servers accepting calls from the internet, allowing four users but only two by each method.  The aim is to use the modem rack and terminal servers to answer the phones, with as many beebs as I can get working connected to other ports on the terminal servers. This will disassociate the link between access method and bbc micro, and allow more people to use the system.  Should they want to.  

At the moment I'm lucky to find even one person visiting ....

Anyway, I'm hoping I'll be able to tidy this lot up as well as getting it working again!  As you can see, it'll need it!

Byte Back

Well, I spent much of yesterday in the outskirts of Stoke-0n-Trent at the 2009 Byte Back retro-gaming event.  Due mainly to the efforts of Dave More from Stairway to Hell, and the BBC Micro mailing list, there was a huge Acorn and BBC micro presence. It was my first trip to a show for at least two decades, so I met lots of people I'd only heard of before, and had lots of great chats and saw lots of wonderful bits of kit.  Seeing the Domesday was definitely a highlight. All in all, I had a whale of a time, and I even manged to get my old viewdata bbs back up and running for the first time in 20 years, all on possibly the largest econet still working in the country.   Well, with nine stations and three different types of fileserver...

Oh, and there were lots of video games there too.

I didn't take many pictures, just a few to set the scene those I did are here... Mine is the last photo of a table with the A5000 running Level 4, and a Model B running the Autonomic host software.  (I had more stuff with me, but no room!)

BeebEm Comms ...

Just thought I'd show a couple of screenshots..




Yep.. that's logging into CCL4 (viewdata BBS) and some random MUD using CommStar on an emulated Beeb... via telnet ...

Still a little more work to do before it's polished, but so far, it's working...

Rob

Down again..

Sigh. Just a quick note to let people know that The BBS is down at the moment, at least for Telnet access. The Beebs are still going fine, but the somewhat younger iolan+ terminal server has died. I think it's a PSU problem, as it makes a ticking noise with a matching pulsing power LED. Unfortunately, it's a built in PSU, so it's going to take some time to get round to diagnosing and fixing that.