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.

No DOSBox on a VPS. No telnet gateway. No separate service to babysit, no daemon, no processes, nothing new on your server at all. Your host stays a plain PHP host and never runs a line of DOS.

Setting one up is four steps: drop the game's folder onto your server the way it sat in C:\LORD, write a small manifest file beside it, press Scan in the console, add it to a menu. That's the whole procedure.

Multi-node works. Two callers in the same game, seeing each other, without tearing the player file. Doors have their own daily time limits, their own access strings, and their own node caps, and they sit in the console beside your other doors.

The setup programs work too, which surprised me more than the games did. LORDCFG and its cousins run from the SysOp console, against the live game, on a real DOS prompt in your browser. No copying the game into DOSBox to configure it and copying it back.

Thirty years of door games were written for DOS and have been effectively stranded ever since. That's the part that got me to build this.

Go play. The demo board is at atdtbbs.com/atdt and the doors are on the menu.

Bring your old board's messages with you

The other half of 1.7.0 is an importer that reads the message history out of a legacy BBS and adds it to yours. The areas, the authors, the dates, the To lines, and the reply threads, all intact.

It reads Mystic, Synchronet, ENiGMA, Talisman, Magicka, RemoteAccess, Telegard, QuickBBS, Maximus, EleBBS, ProBoard, and WWIV. It also reads the raw formats directly, so a message base that outlived the software that wrote it still comes across.

If your board was something rarer, a Commodore 64 or an Apple II or something you wrote yourself, there is a documented open format. Get the data off the old disk in any way you can, put it in that format, and ATDT will take it.

You preview before anything is written: a summary, a row per area, and three real messages from the biggest one so you can see with your own eyes that the accents and the box drawing came through right. Then you decide area by area what lands where. And if it goes wrong, there is an undo. I tested importing 60,000 messages in two different formats (JAM and the ATDT native) and the complete import took less than a minute each.

If you have a shoebox of floppies

That is who this is for. Either half of this release, really. If you have old door games or an old message base and nowhere to put them, 1.7.0 is the release where they come back.

I will send another note when it actually ships. Until then the demo board is the best way to see it: the doors are live on it today.

ATDT is a bulletin board system that runs on ordinary shared hosting. PHP 8.1 and a folder you can write to, no daemon and no build step. Free and MIT licensed. Download · Roadmap