BeeBS

BeeBS is an instance of OBBS by Rob O'Donnell from 1984 originally produced to provide a BBS solution for the Acorn BBC Micro that could support ASCII clients, but could also provide some colour Mode 7 graphics to BBC Micros. Unlike most comms packages for the BBC Micro of the time, OBBS is not intended to host a Viewdata system.

The versions of OBBS that had been archived had been supplied by PACE who had packaged Rob's original program to work with their Auto Answer Board and Pace modem.

My history with the BBC Micro goes back to my childhood, and whilst by the time I was old enough to use a computer PCs were getting pretty well established, my families Acorn BBC Master remained my main computer well in to the 90s. I still had a Beeb and wanted to give it new lease of life, its had many upgrades over the years, giving me the BBC computer I could have only dreamed about at the time.

So in December 2023 I had a Beeb that wasn't being used for much, a disk image of OBBS and a few weeks off work, and thus BeeBS was born.

The main issue I had is that my knowledge of programming is fairly limited to the usual application, not dealing with the RS-432 port or serial communications; I think for someone who is adept at this could have achieved in an afternoon what took me days!

All that needed to be done was to remove the dependency on the PACE answer board by either removing or adapting all code that waited for data from the BBC's User Port, add Hayes compatible AT codes to be sent to the modem (or in this case TCPSer running on a RPi), and have OBBS monitor the serial port for data input to detect a "call".

Once I had a rudimentary system running (answering calls, sending data and disconnecting clients) I worked on adapting the OBBS code so that it could function with a SCSI hard disk under the BBC's ADFS (advanced disk filing system) so that my twin floppy (3 1/2" & 5 1/4") could have a rest, this took a surprising long period of time to get functioning correctly.

Quirks

OBBS does not work well under emulation (although fine on a real BBC Micro), this is true for both using BeebEm as the client or the Server. As the server it will either hang just before or after loading the Intro text as a client it will fail to print all the characters that are stored in the serial input buffer (they are there, it just doesn't display them).
The chat with SysOp option sometimes causes the system to crash but sometimes is fine, I haven't quite got to the bottom of that yet so I've disabled the option from the menu for now.