September 2023 Update

It’s been disturbingly quiet around here, on all of my usual message networks, Discord servers, and the other scene related spots I frequent for a while now, so I thought I might give a quick update on what I’m currently working on just to let you all know I’m not, in fact, dead.

First and foremost, I’m very close to releasing some new stuff with Demonic: version 1.3 of REFDoor, which fixes several bugs and adds a couple of new features, along with a new REFDoor script and updates to my two previously released ones to take advantage of some of the changes in 1.3. Additionally, I’ve also been sitting on a cool new mod by Xqtr that is overdue for a release. I probably won’t follow these releases up with another Demonic newsletter until we’ve got a few more new releases out there, however.

After that, I plan on reviving two long overdue efforts. The first, directly related to my REFDoor work, will be finally completing and standing up my modded Instinct 3.0 board, The Cursed Earth, as well as releasing an ASCII colly devoted to it, and a series of articles and releases around Instinct BBS. Second, a much bigger project and perhaps the only thing on this list anyone is actually anticipating, is that I’m hoping to dive back into Darkness 2.1 soon. I’ve gotten changes to facilitate built-in, traditional InterBBS support approximately 60% done and working great, but beyond finishing that, there are a lot more features, fixes, and content planned.

Changing gears, I’m in the midst of dusting off my Getting Into Amiga series of articles with the addition of what will be numerous posts on my current efforts to finally build my “daily driver” Amiga 500, as well as trying to go back and back-fill everything that has happened since my last post way back in 2020, and then move on to some of the many other cool Amiga related projects I have planned.

Similarly, I’m planning on a couple of posts about some recent PC builds I’ve been working on. I picked up another 1990s DEC PC earlier in the year which turned into a pretty nice little Windows 95 box. I’ve also dusted off an old planned project of mine, another 90s DEC PC which I’m partially upgrading to be a fairly nice, 3D capable Windows 98SE machine not too dissimilar to what I was running in the early 2000s. I have a few other posts related to 90s PC hardware planned too.

I’ve recently started a new, stupidly ambitious effort to attempt to sort and organize all of my scene related files into one huge, cataloged archive. A lot of you know I’ve been something of an archivist (or at least, a collector and a hoarder) since the old days, but lately I’ve been frustrated by not being able to find certain files friends have been searching for since, apart from what is on my BBS, I can’t easily search more than filenames. Between that and a lot of recent unsorted additions to my collection, discovering I didn’t have things I felt sure I did, etc. it felt like something I’ve needed to do. I don’t know what articles might come from these efforts, but it is something I’m sure I’ll want to talk about. While I’ve already added a lot of my old backed up collections from the 1990s, adding EVERYTHING I have will likely take years, and after that I’ll start hunting and adding anything and everything I don’t have. Like I said, stupidly ambitious! That said, I’ve found reading through text and checking out old BBS ads from all kinds of random old files to be quite an unexpected nostalgia trip.

There’s also Zer0net. Apart from occasional bursts of activity, the network has been pretty dead lately and I’ve been tossing around revising it in some big ways for the last year or more. I think it’s almost time to pull the trigger on those changes to hopefully breathe some life back into it, though I still haven’t nailed down exactly what those changes will entail, but I fully acknowledge I’ve sat on the fence too long and need to act. Whatever happens, I’ll definitely be posting about it.

Finally, I have numerous other interesting articles planned for this blog related to specific BBS software, specific BBSes, and some more semi-autobiographical stuff – a lot of the stuff I optimistically mentioned back in my 2022 update – and while I want to share more details about them, I don’t want to promise anything I’m not confident I’ll eventually deliver. I really, really want to work on some of these ideas, but many of them are massive time sinks which means I ultimately keep de-prioritizing them. I’m sure at least a few of these will slip out over time though!

Hopefully some of this is interesting to at least a portion of my visitors and you’ll keep checking back despite the sporadic nature of my posts here. Later!