I decided to make a graphical MMO for BBS. I know pretty dumb idea but I
wanted to see if a persistent world real-time multiplayer with ascii
graphics was possible. Turns out it is and I have it working pretty
well. It's the first time I've made any sort of Client/Server game,
Server is a SQL DB running all the DB reads and writes to keep all the positional and world data live in real-time broadcasting to the other
players. Even things like chopping down trees will update the other
players maps in real-time.

It works great on SyncTERM on my PC, but runs super slow on my Hotroded
Amiga 500, I'm guessing the Network card in the Amiga just isn't that
great, or perhaps I am caching to much server data in RAM and that's
bogging TERM 4.8 down. I need to go look at how much stuff is being
cached as it may be over 2MB. (The world map is 1000x1000 grid)

I'm curious if anyone else wants to try it out and see how the
performance moving around the world is, and would be helpful to know
what hardware you are running it on.

its on deadmodemsociety.com telnet 1337. The game is called BaudQuest:
Dial of Fate.

It's your standard MMO with combat, magic, exploration, crafting, live
chat between players, fishing, sailing, choping down trees, resource
gathreing, puzzle solving, quests, etc. I have quite the feature set
baked in already. But, its totally multiplayer real-time. I had 4
terminal windows open at once and I could see all my players moving
around the map simutaneously, was pretty cool.

|10Xpilot

|16|15- |16|10|16|13"What is it with this guy?" -Phantom Phreak|16
--- CNet/5
* Origin: aBSiNTHE BBS absinthebbs.net:1940 (911:1919/0)

on 11 Jan 2026, Xpilot said...

It works great on SyncTERM on my PC, but runs super slow on my Hotroded Amiga 500, I'm guessing the Network card in the Amiga just isn't that great, or perhaps I am caching to much server data in RAM and that's bogging TERM 4.8 down. I need to go look at how much stuff is being
cached as it may be over 2MB. (The world map is 1000x1000 grid)

I would think your biggest issue on an Amiga 500 is simply going to be the processor speed for drawing/updating the screen over and over again. I don't know what is in your Amiga, but it's hard to imagine you're taxing even a shitty 10 Mb NIC. Do you have a lot of different colors being displayed? That's more raw text that needs to be processed by TERM. In either case, you might want to look at some optimizations - chiefly, only re-draw what *needs* to be re-drawn.

How much server data your server is utilizing should have no bearing on TERM's performance - your connection to a BBS is "dumb" - it's just taking local input and displaying remote output and nothing more, so I'd focus there - what are you actually sending to the client.

its on deadmodemsociety.com telnet 1337. The game is called BaudQuest: Dial of Fate.

Nice. I've been wanting to call your board anyway, so I'll give it a shot sometime soon.

|07j |15A C K |07p |15H L A S H |07!
|08[https://jackphla.sh]

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
* Origin: d i s t o r t i o n // d1st.org (911:1423/0)

On Mon 12-Jan-2026 10:26a, |11Jack Phlash|03 exclaimed to |11Xpilot|08:|03

|10JP|08>|02 displayed? That's more raw text that needs to be processed by TERM. In|03
|10JP|08>|02 either case, you might want to look at some optimizations - chiefly, only|03
|10JP|08>|02 re-draw what *needs* to be re-drawn.|03


|10JP|08>|02 How much server data your server is utilizing should have no bearing on|03
|10JP|08>|02 TERM's performance - your connection to a BBS is "dumb" - it's just taking|03
|10JP|08>|02 local input and displaying remote output and nothing more, so I'd focus|03
|10JP|08>|02 there - what are you actually sending to the client.|03

My Amiga 500 has a 68060 at 100mhz, so I should have the processing side
taken care of, I think from what i've been able to come up with is
that its TERM 4.8, I don't think it can deal with the screen redraws at
5 times a second, but I am drawing most of the screen, so I think your
idea is a good one and only redraw what has changed. I will look into
that and see if that helps, so thank you...

|10Xpilot

|16|15- |16|10|16|13"The pool on the roof must have a leak." -Dade Murphy|16
--- CNet/5
* Origin: aBSiNTHE BBS absinthebbs.net:1940 (911:1919/0)

On Mon 12-Jan-2026 7:24p, |11Xpilot|03 cackled to |11Jack Phlash|08:|03

|10XT|08>|02 that its TERM 4.8, I don't think it can deal with the screen redraws at|03

Do you have the buffer enabled for scrollback in TERM 4.8? That will
seriously slow things down to a crawl. You can right click near the top
of the screen to find the drop-down menu to disable it. It may help!

|11aNACHRONiST |08+o |10aBSiNTHE BBS

|16|10.|16|15|16|10---------------------------------------------------.|16
|16|10||16|13 300 bps Is that life in the sloooow lane or what? |16|10||16
|16|10`---------------------------------------------------'|16
--- CNet/5
* Origin: aBSiNTHE BBS absinthebbs.net:1940 (911:1919/0)

Well look at the big brains on Brad.... (Jack)

Jack, I did some research and found "Differential Rendering"
Basically what you described, write the screen to a buffer and do a
comparisson and then only send the items that have changed.

So I have this running now live in production and it made a MASSIVE
difference on how the game runs on the Amiga! Its just about as fast now
as SyncTERM and PC.

I thank you for this!

I know its silly to make a live multiplayer BBS game in today's day and
age because I may not have many players at all. That is the nature of
BBSing today. But my curiousity got the better of me and I wanted to see
what was possible...

|10Xpilot

|16|15- |16|10|16|13"It's universally stupid, man!" -Cereal Killer|16
--- CNet/5
* Origin: aBSiNTHE BBS absinthebbs.net:1940 (911:1919/0)

On Tue 13-Jan-2026 1:02a, |11aNACHRONiST|03 yodeled to |11Xpilot|08:|03

|10AT|08>|02 Do you have the buffer enabled for scrollback in TERM 4.8? That will|03
|10AT|08>|02 seriously slow things down to a crawl. You can right click near the top|03
|10AT|08>|02 of the screen to find the drop-down menu to disable it. It may help!|03

I've got that disabled, and I think it was you that gave me that tip a
while back when I was trying to connect the board with a lightly modded
A500 and it was so slow. Who knew, 40 year old computers weren't
designed around network cards :)

Once I got a 68020 accelrator then it seems like it was fast enough to
keep up with the tcpip stack. Just one one those things we take for
granded today. tcpip has really a ton of overhead that we just don't
realize because hardware is so much faster today.

|10Xpilot

|16|15- |16|10|16|13"If I win, you become my slave." -Acid Burn|16
--- CNet/5
* Origin: aBSiNTHE BBS absinthebbs.net:1940 (911:1919/0)

on 12 Jan 2026, Xpilot said...

My Amiga 500 has a 68060 at 100mhz, so I should have the processing side taken care of, I think from what i've been able to come up with is
that its TERM 4.8, I don't think it can deal with the screen redraws at
5 times a second, but I am drawing most of the screen, so I think your idea is a good one and only redraw what has changed. I will look into
that and see if that helps, so thank you...

Doh! My bad... err, but an Amiga 500 with a 68060/100 in it!?! Gooooooooooooood lawd! :P

Just out of curiosity, what kind of Amiga 500 accelerator supports that? I'm thinking maybe an ACA500 using an A1200 accelerator like an ACA1260 or something? Or is it a "fake" processor like a Vampire or a PiStorm. Sick in any case.

|07j |15A C K |07p |15H L A S H |07!
|08[https://jackphla.sh]

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
* Origin: d i s t o r t i o n // d1st.org (911:1423/0)

on 13 Jan 2026, Xpilot said...

Well look at the big brains on Brad.... (Jack)

Jack, I did some research and found "Differential Rendering"
Basically what you described, write the screen to a buffer and do a comparisson and then only send the items that have changed.

So I have this running now live in production and it made a MASSIVE difference on how the game runs on the Amiga! Its just about as fast now as SyncTERM and PC.

I thank you for this!

Awesome. You're welcome! This is really just a traditional optimization technique - I'm not trying to speak as if I'm the most technically gifted programmer out there (far from it!) but I will take half a step up onto my soapbox to say that the art of optimizing code for (relatively) archaic hardware specs is disappearing in this age where you can write the most inefficient, bloated-ass code ever and it'll still run *blazingly* fast on modern hardware. E.g. most things amateurs write in Python. ;) It's just not a big concern anymore.

I know its silly to make a live multiplayer BBS game in today's day and age because I may not have many players at all. That is the nature of BBSing today. But my curiousity got the better of me and I wanted to see what was possible...

Eh, I think its pretty cool, personally. :) I mean, Darkness 2.0 has "live" multi-node features and I've had a lot of vague ideas about a centrally connected live/real-time door game as well (although that's not currently on my future project list, opting for more traditional door game designs.)

|07j |15A C K |07p |15H L A S H |07!
|08[https://jackphla.sh]

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
* Origin: d i s t o r t i o n // d1st.org (911:1423/0)

On Wed 14-Jan-2026 2:33p, |11Jack Phlash|03 mused to |11Xpilot|08:|03

|10JP|08>|02 Just out of curiosity, what kind of Amiga 500 accelerator supports that?|03
|10JP|08>|02 I'm thinking maybe an ACA500 using an A1200 accelerator like an ACA1260 or|03
|10JP|08>|02 something? Or is it a "fake" processor like a Vampire or a PiStorm. Sick|03
|10JP|08>|02 in any case.|03

You got it exactly right. ACA1260 plugged into the ACA500Plus. May be a
wee bit overkill, but at the time I was messing with TCPIP stack stuff
and I was thinking the CPU was bottlenecking it and I decided to throw a sledgehammer at it....

Side Note, I was able to add Arrow key support to BaudQuest today. It
was a little tricky as thoses key use all sorts of escape codes and the
code reading imput was very basic, just simple single characters. But It
works now with either the WASD or Arrow keys. I was trying to emulate
standard MMOs where your left hand is movement and right hand is combat
(Mouse)

|10Xpilot

|16|15- |16|10|16|13"Mess with the best, die like the rest." -Dade Murphy|16
--- CNet/5
* Origin: aBSiNTHE BBS absinthebbs.net:1940 (911:1919/0)

on 15 Jan 2026, Xpilot said...

You got it exactly right. ACA1260 plugged into the ACA500Plus. May be a wee bit overkill, but at the time I was messing with TCPIP stack stuff
and I was thinking the CPU was bottlenecking it and I decided to throw a sledgehammer at it....

Yep, that's a sledgehammer alright! :P

Side Note, I was able to add Arrow key support to BaudQuest today. It
was a little tricky as thoses key use all sorts of escape codes and the code reading imput was very basic, just simple single characters. But It works now with either the WASD or Arrow keys. I was trying to emulate standard MMOs where your left hand is movement and right hand is combat (Mouse)

Nice! Yeah, I immediately went for the arrow keys because, you know, it was a door game, but then I figured out pretty quickly that it was WASD and it felt fine to control that way, but I figured, why not both?

|07j |15A C K |07p |15H L A S H |07!
|08[https://jackphla.sh]

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
* Origin: d i s t o r t i o n // d1st.org (911:1423/0)

On Thu 15-Jan-2026 5:46p, |11Jack Phlash|03 waffled to |11Xpilot|08:|03

|10JP|08>|02 Nice! Yeah, I immediately went for the arrow keys because, you know, it|03
|10JP|08>|02 was a door game, but then I figured out pretty quickly that it was WASD|03
|10JP|08>|02 and it felt fine to control that way, but I figured, why not both?|03

Yeah, certainly makes sense to have both, I just though it was
interesting to learn how much more difficult it was to do arrows vs
WASD. I finished the first Dungeon last night (Out of 8) The game has
gotten so out of control that I had to make a HTML map editor to be able
to get what I want from the Dungeons. Here's a screen shot of my crappy
little map editor.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ptc2ryzjdti1txy80aj45/MapEditor.jpg?rlkey=dm8hl 77x3lep0mf3wvhw5ts09&dl=0

|10Xpilot

|16|15- |16|10|16|13"Spandex: it's a privilege, not a right." -Cereal Killer|16
--- CNet/5
* Origin: aBSiNTHE BBS absinthebbs.net:1940 (911:1919/0)

to get what I want from the Dungeons. Here's a screen shot of my crappy little map editor.

Hey now, that's pretty slick!

|03--|11[|05esc|13!|05dEMONIC|11]|03--|07

--- DayDream BBS/UNIX (Linux) 2.15a
* Origin: [>mONTEREYbBS.COM>] (911:1719/0)

on 16 Jan 2026, Xpilot said...

Yeah, certainly makes sense to have both, I just though it was
interesting to learn how much more difficult it was to do arrows vs
WASD. I finished the first Dungeon last night (Out of 8) The game has gotten so out of control that I had to make a HTML map editor to be able to get what I want from the Dungeons. Here's a screen shot of my crappy little map editor.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ptc2ryzjdti1txy80aj45/MapEditor.jpg?rlkey=d 77x3lep0mf3wvhw5ts09&dl=0

That's awesome!

|07j |15A C K |07p |15H L A S H |07!
|08[https://jackphla.sh]

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A47 2021/12/25 (Windows/32)
* Origin: d i s t o r t i o n // d1st.org (911:1423/0)

Just wanted to drop a note in here to ignore the previous BBS address.
I have moved the BBS to use telnet.deadmodemsociety.com port 1337. (old
address was deadmodemsociety.com)

Microsoft gives our company employees $150 of Azure credits per month.
So I spun up a Linux VM in Azure and installed apache and setup a crappy website for the BBS, that seems like the thing to do...

The only way I could get Telnet to one IP and a website on another IP
working on the same domain name was to create a subdomain for the BBS
using the telent prefix. Fun stuff...

|10Xpilot

|16|15- |16|10|16|13"This is the end, my friend. Thank you for calling." -The Plague|16
--- CNet/5
* Origin: aBSiNTHE BBS absinthebbs.net:1940 (911:1919/0)

Just wanted to drop a note in here to ignore the previous BBS address.
I have moved the BBS to use telnet.deadmodemsociety.com port 1337. (old address was deadmodemsociety.com)

The website looks great - I'll have to spin over to the bbS and check it out! Thanks for sharing the updates...

Microsoft gives our company employees $150 of Azure credits per month.
So I spun up a Linux VM in Azure and installed apache and setup a crappy website for the BBS, that seems like the thing to do...

Nice - I want to play around w/ Azure one day. I used to swear by linode.com, but they were bought out by a bigger phish...



|07p|15AULIE|1142|07o
|08.........

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64)
* Origin: 2o fOr beeRS bbS>>20ForBeers.com:1337 (911:1503/0)

Re: Re: Any play testers?
By: paulie420 to Xpilot on Mon Jan 19 2026 03:48 pm

Microsoft gives our company employees $150 of Azure credits per month. So
I spun up a Linux VM in Azure and installed apache and setup a crappy
website for the BBS, that seems like the thing to do...

$150/month? That's pretty awesome.

Nice - I want to play around w/ Azure one day. I used to swear by linode.com but they were bought out by a bigger phish...

I run a couple of Linode VMs, not noticed much during the transition except where the invoices come from...
--- SBBSecho 3.33-Win32
* Origin: realitycheckBBS.org -- information is power. (911:1415/0)

Nice - I want to play around w/ Azure one day. I used to swear by linode.com, but they were bought out by a bigger phish...

I'm a fan of DigitalOcean. They're not the cheapest but they are reliable and connectivity is fast. I dig it. Monterey is hosted there.

|03--|11[|05esc|13!|05dEMONIC|11]|03--|07

--- DayDream BBS/UNIX (Linux) 2.15a
* Origin: [>mONTEREYbBS.COM>] (911:1719/0)

On Mon 19-Jan-2026 3:48p, |11Paulie420|03 chortled to |11Xpilot|08:|03

|10P0|08>|02 The website looks great - I'll have to spin over to the bbS and check it|03
|10P0|08>|02 out! Thanks for sharing the updates...|03

|10P0|08>|02 Nice - I want to play around w/ Azure one day. I used to swear by|03
|10P0|08>|02 linode.com, but they were bought out by a bigger phish...|03

The Website and BBS aren't anything special but thank you, I don't have
the graphical chops that some of you folks here do, but seems like you
want media out there for people to find you. I am a super creative
person that spends most of the day just thinking, but I have zero
artistic talent. So making BBS games is one outlet that fits my
capabilities.

Oh man, Linode got swallowed up? Seems to be the corporate trend today
though I suppose. tech start ups goals are to be acquired now, not to
become the next big thing...

|10Xpilot

|16|15- |16|10|16|13"The pool on the roof must have a leak." -Dade Murphy|16
--- CNet/5
* Origin: aBSiNTHE BBS absinthebbs.net:1940 (911:1919/0)

I used to swear by linode, but they were bought out by a bigger

SEEN-BY: 1404/0 1423/0