I don't know how I got here. I have never used a BBS before. This is neat.

Hello everyone, Would love to get some legit old school hardware to visit BBS'es on. Whats the best hardware to get all the color ANSI goodness? Commodore 64? Atari ST?

This is neat. I like the avatars.
Anyway, I won't take up too much of your time

Signed,
A lost Traveler.

Re: oh crap what did I do
By: Johnny Be Bad to All on Wed Apr 18 2018 08:42 am

I don't know how I got here. I have never used a BBS before. This is neat.

Welcome! Congrats on actually connecting and managing to write a message. :)

Hello everyone, Would love to get some legit old school hardware to visit BBS'es on. Whats the best hardware to get all the color ANSI goodness? Commodore 64? Atari ST?

So "ANSI" in the BBS context means EGA colors and the IBM's extended character set (often called "extended ASCII" or "Codepage 437"). The best way to experience that on vintage hardware would be with an old PC running DOS.

Other platforms like the C64, the Atari 8-bit, or the Atari ST each had their own distinctive default character sets and encodings different from ANSI. Each one has special terminal programs that can emulate the ANSI experience, but it wasn't built in.

If you have a C64, PETSCII is the native character set. There are a number of good Commodore boards that have cool PETSCII stuff. Similarly there are Atari 8-bit BBSes that feature ATASCII, or Atari ST boards with VT-52.

--Josh

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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog

Re: oh crap what did I do
By: Kirkman to Johnny Be Bad on Wed Apr 18 2018 09:19 am

Sweet! I made it back So from what you're saying. It sounds like some of the older hardware is not compatible for the more "modern" Code Page 437 stuff? Are there systems that are sort of all in one and suppport all of them?


Thanks for the help!

Re: oh crap what did I do
By: Johnny Be Bad to All on Wed Apr 18 2018 08:42 am

I don't know how I got here. I have never used a BBS before. This is neat.

Welcome! This is what real retro computing is all about - an age before the internet, and when "online communities" really were communities! Glad to see a "new" face!

What got you interested in checking out BBSes?

■dmxrob■ BBSing from St. Louis, MO since 1988

Re: oh crap what did I do
By: Johnny Be Bad to Kirkman on Wed Apr 18 2018 11:15 am

Sweet! I made it back So from what you're saying. It sounds like some of the older hardware is not compatible for the more "modern" Code Page 437 stuff? Are there systems that are sort of all in one and suppport all of them?

Maybe a better way to put it is that each of the big platforms of the 80s (Apple, Atari, Commodore, IBM, etc) seemed to have its own character set and encoding. All of them could understand plain ASCII text, but they all did something different with the "high" or "extended" ASCII characters.

What's more, they all had different resolutions and color modes. When we talk about "ANSI art", we are usually thinking of a 16-color, 80x25 text mode. The color palette is very specific: the PC's CGA palette.

On the Atari ST, to give one example, there wasn't a built-in way to have a 16-color 80x25 text mode. The ST had three resolutions: low (16 colors), medium (4 colors), and high (black/white). 80x25 was only possible in medium and high resolution. The ST's character set was somewhat similar to the PC, but it substituted Hebrew characters and other symbols in various parts of the character table. Lastly, the Atari ST had a VT52-based screen driver rather than VT100, so the escape codes for changing colors or moving the cursor were different from the PC.

Now, that being said, as PC BBSes proliferated and ANSI art/graphcs became ubiquitous, people using Ataris and Macs and C64s wanted terminals programs that were compatible. So authors wrote such terminals for all platforms. They usually had to employ special tricks to get enough colors.

On the Atari ST the two best terminals for ANSI emulation were "ANSIterm" and "TAZ". These each used different tricks to provide ANSI emulation.

ANSIterm was basically a low-resolution program which used custom characters
on a 3x8 frid, rather than the system default 8x8. This allowed it to have 16 colors, but 80 columns of text. Obviously the characters would have looked a bit weird if compared to a PC.

TAZ used a different trick. It ran in 4-color medium resolution, but used very fast palette switching (literally switching back and forth between various colors) to create the illusion of extra colors. For example, if you flicker back and forth between red and green, you get yellow.

This is a very long way of saying that no matter what platform you pick, there is almost certainly some solution for calling ANSI BBSes. I'm partial to Atari, so I have a Mega STe here at home, and when I use it for BBSing, I usually use ANSIterm.

If you want a "purer" ANSI experience, well, your best bet is to get an old DOS PC.

--Josh

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BiC -=- http://breakintochat.com -=- bbs wiki and blog