My absolute favorite games were those running on my “Bulletin Board System”, TheVariable.
I used a variety of DOS based BBS server apps, from WWIV & RABBS to Synchronet & Mystic, as my hardware and software collection changed over time.
Most of my ancient machines do not offer much graphics capability;
My favorite BBS door games had colored text and any graphic art was delivered in “ANSI” (colored ASCII) symbols.
I left the dinosaur running full-time, synchronizing message-board & inter-BBS game data with other BBSs overnight.
My PC was not always on & I moved around a lot, but my friends could log on even when I was not at home & we could wage epic battles through games that strictly limited your turns per day. Players with only 10-20 minutes to play per week could remain competitive with full-time gamers, simply because many of the games would kick you out after only 12-30 minutes (or less!). “No turns left, come back tomorrow!”
Even when TCP/IP internet made its way into my home, Telnet continued to provide new life & new player communities to my favorite games. To this day, there are active servers and web-portals where you can login & play many of those ancient BBS door games, for free, from virtually any device!
My favorites were/are:
TradeWars 2002 v2 Beta GOLD – with many redistributable community mods
Legend Of the Red Dragon – with many redistributable community mods
LORD 2 – with redistributable community mods
Global War (basically Risk, only you actually get to finish the game more often)
(A game with an ANSI splash screen reading “TERRA FIRMA”: It featured an ANSI map of your empire, filled with mountains, rivers, hills, plains, forest, etc, upon which you built roads, walls, fisheries, mines, & factories to build robots. You could build robots using various chassis, weapon & drive sections, each with differing capabilities. When the construction/management phase of your turn was done you moved your bots & could send them across the border to explore & attack the maps of other players. This game was apparently not distributed to many BBSs & appears to have disappeared into the depths of history.)
Land Of Devastation (I found the map display ugly & small compared to LORD 2)
Barren Realms Elite (I was not very good at this)
Planets, The Exploration Of Space (It was an OK game… Spaceship!)
FreeDOS does not have SHARE.EXE support, so none of my BBS apps will run under a default DOSbox setup.
With a Telnet capable BBS such as Mystic running in DOSbox, my mobile device could allow my friends to login & play dozens of classic text-based BBS door games, from anywhere they can open a connection!
I am hoping to set up MS-DOS 6.22 so that I can get some of those old game licenses running again!
If anyone can advise me of suitable settings to get an MS-DOS 6.22 based BBS server running in Magic DOSbox for Android, I’d greatly appreciate the help.