As usual, I’ve been sitting on these for far, far too long, but in the spirit of Christmas, I think it’s time to give a little gift to the BBS scene by publishing the next small batch of releases from Demonic Productions!
With July’s batch of releases, esc and I appeared to have stirred xqtr from his ancient slumber. As usually seems to be the case, while esc and I are off producing weird niche stuff, xqtr is bringing the people what they really want with some fresh, diabolically creative Mystic mods.
First we have his Screensaver Scripts for Mystic. This is a collection of cool screensaver-like animations written in MPL – classic effects like bouncing text around the screen, showing logos in random parts of the screen, and a cool “whitenoise” like effect. My personal favorite is the red Matrix style animation, if anyone cares. 😉 Furthermore, it comes with instructions on how to modify your existing menus to actually make these function like a screensaver (you’ve got to love Mystic’s TIMER function!) The scripts of course include their source code, so these also serve as nice, general examples of MPL coding, and an easy foundation to build your own screensavers from.
The education doesn’t stop there! xqtr’s other release, Status Bar Mod AKA “MODDING with ACS & MENU CMDs” is another damn cool one – an active status bar that appears across all of your menus, showing various user flags and details. Beyond being nifty in the first place, this release is presented as a tutorial which covers creative uses of basic modding topics like menu editing, the ACS system, and system flags. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a mod like this before, so if I log into one of your BBSes and see a sweet status bar following me around, I’m just going to assume you stole it from us. 😁
Next up, with a bit of a blast from the past, esc has released a newly bug fixed version of his Daydream Bot Blocker mod, pictured above. Intended to stop bot connections, this program runs after your initial connection, prompting the user to provide some specific input in order to progress. As usual with his Daydream/Linux releases, this includes the C source code so you can compile it yourself. Special thanks to deathr0w of Entropy BBS for the bug report!
Finally, I (Jack Phlash) have put together a quick, somewhat high level tutorial on how to use point systems with echomail networks using Mystic BBS as a demonstration, stupidly titled What’s The Point?!. I originally put this together after a conversation with esc, but decided to turn it into a full release, as how to use points is a subject that has come up more than a few times over the years that I’ve run Zer0net, and with more and more of us running multiple BBSes these days, I figured it might help out some of our fellow SysOps out there. I also like how the filename of this release looks like it somehow involves pants.
Not weird enough for you? My other release Online Node List IPL v1.1 is an IPL-based replacement for Iniquity 2.x’s node list. For one, who cares about Iniquity BBS these days? Also, why replicate something that already exists? Well, I do. Also, it’s because most of us who fiddle with Iniquity these days probably launch it via some kind of front-end rather than having it answer calls from its WFC screen, and Iniquity only shows nodes that it thinks are actually up. This mod, instead, shows the status of all nodes, which I personally prefer, aesthetically. Additionally, it also serves as a practical example of reading binary files using IPL, which is pretty damn esoteric. Special thanks to the legend Maskreet of Throwback BBS and of course DoorParty for the initial request, as well as some crucial testing assistance.
Now we’re truly behind on another newsletter release, so that’s up next!