If your board runs MySQL or MariaDB, every door game has been crashing on its second visit. Isle of Morrow died coming back through the gate. HILO lasted about three rounds. Upgrade to 1.7.4 and it stops.

The cause is a good one. MySQL reports how many rows an UPDATE changed. SQLite reports how many it matched. So when a door wrote a value the row already held, MySQL answered zero, ATDT read zero as "there is no such row," and the repair INSERT collided with the row that was there the whole time. SQLite boards never saw it, because SQLite never says zero for a row it found.

The report that cracked it came in from the field with the diagnosis already attached, and the diagnosis was right. Whoever you are: thank you.

No data was harmed. The crash always fired before a bad write could land, so upgrading is the entire fix. Nothing to clean up, nothing to re-enter, and no schema change either.

OK- Promise this is the last ATDT update for a bit! Work on the new ATA Project revealed some significant issues behind the scenes in the DOS Door code.

Two things you will actually notice, and a pile you will not.

The cursor. A caller wrote in to say the cursor didn't blink at the prompt the way it did on the main menu. He was being generous. Outside a typing field there was no cursor at all, and the main menu only appeared to have one where the art happened to paint a blinking cell. Every hotkey prompt on the board now keeps a proper blinking underscore: menus, pause lines, pagers, the whole logon tour. It is drawn over the screen rather than into it, so art underneath survives untouched.

The logon tour is yours. The cards between the password and the main menu (welcome screen, unread bulletins, auto-message, rumor, last ten callers) always ran in one fixed order. Now you arrange them, or switch any of them off, or switch all of them off and drop callers straight at the main menu. Boards that never touch the setting run the classic order, unchanged.

Last note for a while, I promise.

1.7.2 is out. DOS doors can now name a program that needs running once a day, which TradeWars 2002 and Usurper both do. The board arms it at midnight and the first caller who enters alone runs it on the way in, the way a BBS event worked in 1993. There is a console button for quiet days. The TradeWars package on the site already ships the field, so EXTERN stops being your chore.

Also fixed: doors that keep their data in a subdirectory could stumble on their first entry of the day, and the console maintenance page now shows the door's line beside the DOS screen, so a game run by hand no longer looks like it is doing nothing.

And something else. There is now a native ATDT port of Usurper: a one for one rebuild of 0.25 from the original Pascal source, running as a native door rather than through the DOS machine. Same gang wars, same dungeon, same town full of computer characters insulting your players by name. It is still a WIP, but it's on the demo board now and not downloadable yet. GPL, like the original.

Short one. If you downloaded 1.7.0 today, grab 1.7.1.

I broke the DOS doors the night before release. A door would die a few seconds after a caller entered it, dumping them back at the menu, but only once their browser had visited a door before. A fresh browser worked fine, which is exactly why it got past me: every test in a clean window passed.

The cause, for the curious: 1.7.0 also taught browsers to cache the emulator, so on a second visit the DOS machine booted instantly and reached the game while the game's files were still transferring. The two fought over the line and the game's first reads timed out. The machine now waits for the transfer before it boots.

Also fixed: a door that died mid-transfer used to flood the SysOp log with security warnings and print its progress dots over the menu screen.

It shipped. Everything in the last note is real and downloadable now.

The DOS doors run in the caller's browser, with no DOSBox and nothing DOS on your server. The importer reads your old board's message history into ATDT with the threads and dates intact.

Two things I did not mention last time:

Some doors are packaged and ready. The Pit, Arrowbridge II, Drakeville 3.0 and TradeWars 2002 are zipped up and set to go: unzip into dosdoors/, press Scan, add a menu item. TradeWars in particular ships as an installer that wants a real DOS machine, so having it pre-built saves a fiddly hour.

ATDT 1.7.0 is close, probably within the week, and it is the biggest release since the board went out. Two things, and I still find both of them slightly hard to believe.

The DOS doors run

Legend of the Red Dragon, Usurper, and The Pit are all playing on the demo board right now. The actual DOS programs. Not rewrites, not homages, not something that acts like LORD. The same .EXE files that came in the registration package thirty years ago, running on a board, in a browser tab.

There is nothing to install. Not for you and not for your callers.

Version 1.6.5 is out, and it is the one I have wanted to build for a while. It is about letting parts of your board have their own message life, instead of the whole system sharing one idea of "where I am reading."

Three things arrived, and they compose.

Point a menu item at a board

Read, Post, and New scan items grew an optional Area field. Set it and that one item acts on that one board, for that press only. The caller's current area does not move, anywhere.