BBS Software Development News

July 25, 1998

July has been an intresting month for BBS development. Two clones of the original RemoteAccess BBS have been released to the public for the first time this month! Both are drop-in replacments for the original RA, so you can use all your existing menus, file/message bases, and doors and utilities. Niel Schoots tcRemoteAccess32 is a Windows 95/98/NT BBS, currently in wide-beta. Maarten Beckers EleBBS comes in DOS, Windows 95/98/NT, and OS/2 versions! EleBBS is released as a public gamma. Niether program comes with documentation yet, so if you are not already familure with RemoteAccess you should install and configure RA 2.5x (a DOS only BBS) first and read the RA.DOC before advancing to the newer generation BBS software.

Also expected this month is another 32-bit RA clone, ProBoard/32 by Philippe Leybaert. ProBoard sysops have been waiting since the summer of 1996 to try the first 32-bit version of this BBS, but after numorus delays the author vanished into seclusion and has rarley been heard from since. When we last heard from him back in April, he made a commitment to finally work on finishing ProBoard during this summer, and he claimed he would release the first beta before the end of July 1998. He said that if he can't meet that deadline, he will give it all up and release the source code!

Flip Maertens, a Windows programmer who had offered to rewrite the windows version of ProBoard ProCfg, never recieved the needed structures from Philippe, so the NiteTime project was scrapped. Flip was later bitten by a vampire bat in an unrelated incident. :)

The beta team for the original RemoteAccess (now owned by Bruce Morse) is still waiting for the first beta version. Bruce has become familure with andrews source code during the past several months, and is now tracking down several of the reported bugs in RA 2.50 (identical to 2.52). He hopes to give the beta team the first beta of RA shortly. The next release of RA should primarly be a bux fix version, with no new features.

Konstantin Klyagin appears to have abandoned Tornado BBS, another RA clone with some added features. Tornado was FREEWARE, and was developed in DOS and OS/2 versions. His Tornado web site was recently removed.

Dedrick Allen is still re-writing NetModem/32, the Windows Telnet server for DOS fossil based BBS packages. As reported in April, the previous versions of NetModem/32 have been rather unstable, so Dedrick has been rewriting it this time using all his own code rather then the code that comes with Borland Delphi. We recently heard from Dedrick, and he still plans to have the new version available this summer.

Dedrick's next project will be to release a 32-bit FOSSIL API for BBS developers to use with their Windows based BBS products. Dedrick desided not to use the WinFOSSIL specs after all, and will instead add on to the existing level-5 fossil specifications. Several BBS develpers plan to support this telnet API in their BBS products.

This July edition of the BBS news is simular to the previous April edition in many ways. You may want to take a peek back at the April edition to see what has changed, and what has not. :)


Hits since July 25 1998:



Older News:
BBS News April 1998
BBS News March 1998
January 1998 ProBoard/32 release date postponed
December 1997 RemoteAccess was finally sold!
October 1997 ProBoard author plans to continues development!
October 1997 Mike Ehlert reappears

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