Cottonwood BBS is operational!

On Dec 8, 2006, at 1:59 AM, Andrew Wiskow wrote: Andrew: Bless your heart, but here's a few pointers on what might make it work better. First off, for 99% of us in the universe nowadays, C64Term for the PC (as suggested on the website) simply won't work. Pretty much every computer sold in the last 10 years is equipped with a Winmodem, and real "hardware" modems have been impossible to find for the last 5. I personally don't know of a better solution, other than to use a C64 emulator and bind to whatever modem people have. I don't know what the answer is, but hopefully somebody can figure out a Windows- compatible solution. Which brings me to my next suggestion. I know you're trying to "keep it real" with the CBM 1670 1200bps modem, but as you point out, many modern modems have problems working with it. Oddly enough, one of the reason why is because many 1200bps modems don't do a modern negotiation, with the 2100Hz tone in front of it, they just answer with the Bell 2225 Hz tone. You can observe this: if you call a modern modem, it answers and plays a lower pitched tone before a higher pitched tone: that's the 2100 Hz tone followed by the 2225 Hz. The reason the 2100 Hz tone is important is many telco facilities (and even some VoIP ones) listen for that tone, and if they hear it will make a "best effort" to minimize noise cancellation and other stuff to make it easier for modems to communicate. Also, there's modulations on that lower pitched tone that give modern modems a clue as to what protocols the reception modem can support. This is important. These features weren't really commonly available until 2400bps modems became commonplace. My suggestion would be to acquire an RS-232 interface for your C-64, and use a modern modem.. even if you lock it at 1200 or 2400bps on the serial side (since the C64 and many BBS programs were notorious for not working much above 2400). Back in the day, few "serious" BBS hobbyists (even in the C64 camp) used Commodore modems for running a BBS: they had a number of "known faults" that made them poor choices. (Don't feel bad, I ran my first BBS on a 1660 [!] for a number of months) Another suggestion you might want to pass along to people connecting is to disable all the error correction and compression. This is probably why people aren't seeing the graphics mode prompt (as you hint to on your site). I don't know the fairly standard AT commands to make this happen, but they shouldn't be difficult to find. The "modern modem" suggestion would help here, as well: since it would support all the new-fangled compression modes, negotiation would be quicker and completed before the modem raised CD. Lastly, and this is more of a debatably helpful suggestion: have you considered just running the BBS on an emulator? My reasons for asking this are serious. First off, C64 hardware was notoriously flaky as a BBS platform when the hardware was new. In the fairly short lifetime of my C64-based BBS, I went through two power supplies, a number of disk drives, and countless diskettes (even on my low-traffic BBS, I observed that if I didn't swap out the floppies once a week, they'd develop errors). Now that the components of your BBS are approaching (or even exceeding, unless you have a fairly new vintage C64) 20 years old, they are increasingly fragile and even more likely to break. It was one thing in 1985 to replace a VIC-1541, and I'd hate to think if you're running something like an SFD-1001 what you'd have to go through to replace it. Additionally, emulation would allow people to use Telnet to connect, and would allow those of us with no functional landline (believe it or not, there's now a lot of people who depend solely on broadband- delivered VoIP and cellular exclusively) to play the home game. Just some suggestions. Otherwise, good effort, and as soon as I figure out how to get a CBMSCII terminal emulator to work on the Macintosh, I'll be calling!