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 O'Donnell (1984) which had been uploaded to the Stardot forum. I'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 I'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 existing 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.

Connecting the Beeb via its RS432 port to a USB serial adapter on a Raspberry Pi (3b) 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)