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BeeBS
The BBS designed for the BBC Micro
Updates
OBBS returns
On a rather dull cold day I had a few hours to myself and decided to fire
up the version of OBBS by Rob Ob Donnell (1984) which had been uploaded to
the Stardot forum. Ib d wanted to run a BBS on my Beeb for a while but had
been unable to get OBBS to detect when a user was trying to connect. Both
the versions floating around the internet are after PACE had made
alterations to lock OBBS into working with their Nightingale modem (which
OBBS was packaged with).
Removing this dependency on the Nightingale modem proved to be a fairly
simple task...once Ib d figured out what I was doing and dusted off the 20
year old cobwebs from my memory. The archived versions of OBBS waited for
a signal from an auto-answer board which connected via the user port, to
initiate a connection. A simple fix was to modify the exisiting REPEAT :
UNTIL statements to monitor ADVAL-2 instead which will check to see if
there is any data waiting on the Beebs RS432 serial input buffer, if there
is OBBS assumes that this is a caller and springs in to action.
10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10
Connecting the Beeb via itb s RS432 port to a USB serial adapter on a
Raspberry Pi (3) running an instance of TcpSer allowed for a few test
users to connect. All worked reasonably well however there were a few
issues that needed attention:
1. OBBS cannot disconnect a call
2. OBBS cannot CHAIN out of OBBS to load other programs/door games
(despite this being documented in the user guide, neither archived
version supported this)
Created on my Acorn BBC Master 128
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