FYI- This weekend I had access to some old PCs and two POTS lines and decided to experiment with some old-fashioned analog. For the most part Mystic works
as you'd expect over oldschool dialup, but I did run into something a bit odd.

It doesn't look like Mystic's menus will scroll past the bottom of the screen when connecting through a DOS-based terminal like Telix. Once it reaches the last line it just continually overwrites that line. Though I only found two instances where it tries to scroll past line 24 in the time I had to play
with it: On the message menu when you pull up the nodelist browser, and during login if your banner + login activity exceeds 24 lines combined. I discovered the latter by accident with a test login screen that just barely fit
(password prompt on line 24), and then the prompt to login invisibly
overwrote that line. Doorgames and the goodbye ANSI art scrolled just fine.

I tried configuring Telix to add a linefeed to each carriage return it receives, which did then allow it to scroll past line 24 but resulted in a double linefeed so there was an empty line between every line of text.

Odd behaviour in a 90s terminal program, albeit not terribly relevant these days.

The server setup was a modern laptop running Ubuntu and Mystic 1.12 A36, both 64bit. A Conextant 56K USB modem was controlled by mgetty which launched
Mystic when dialed. On the client side I used an old Pentium desktop with a
USR ISA 56K modem running MS-DOS 6.22 and Telix 3.22.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A36 2017/12/03 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Subcarrier BBS (21:2/140)

I tried configuring Telix to add a linefeed to each carriage return it receives, which did then allow it to scroll past line 24 but resulted in
a double linefeed so there was an empty line between every line of text.

It is awesome that you had the hardware to toy around with that. If I had a setup I could use with analog phone lines, I would probably add a serial server into MIS. Its too bad we can't use VOIP reliably because I have access to
one of those. I bet we'd still have a bunch of dialup BBSes if we could.

I'm not really sure how to look into this given we don't really have a way to test and debug. Did you happen to try any other terminals like Qmodem?

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A37 2017/12/17 (Windows/32)
* Origin: Sector 7 [Mystic BBS WHQ] (21:1/108)

On 12/18/17, g00r00 said the following...

It is awesome that you had the hardware to toy around with that. If I
had a setup I could use with analog phone lines, I would probably add a serial server into MIS. Its too bad we can't use VOIP reliably because
I have access to one of those. I bet we'd still have a bunch of dialup BBSes if we could.

A 2-port phone line emulator would probably be perfect for testing purposes without needing actual POTS lines, assuming there are any to be found cheaply secondhand. I haven't tried VOIP but I imagine for it to work at all you'd
need proper G.711u encoding with sufficient bandwidth and consistent latency, and to ensure no manipulation of the audio is being done. eg: no in-audio sideband signals, echo cancellation, that sort of thing... It would have to
be set up very specifically for modem communication but it ought to work in theory.

I'm not really sure how to look into this given we don't really have a
way to test and debug. Did you happen to try any other terminals like Qmodem?

I only had time enough to set everything up and test Telix. It essentially involved beige boxing a neighbor (with their permission) so there's some
prep involved. I do plan to test Procomm and Qmodem when I next get a chance. They are on the list.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A36 2017/12/03 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Subcarrier BBS (21:2/140)

A 2-port phone line emulator would probably be perfect for testing purposes without needing actual POTS lines, assuming there are any to be found cheaply secondhand. I haven't tried VOIP but I imagine for it to

I wasn't even aware of this possibility! I just did a quick Amazon search and I see one for $110. I'll have to research on this more. Finding 2x USB modems that work in Windows 10, OSX, Intel Ubuntu and ARM Raspbian may or may not be trouble. It sounds like it might be possible to add POTS support for ~$200 and some loss of hair :)

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A37 2017/12/17 (Windows/32)
* Origin: Sector 7 [Mystic BBS WHQ] (21:1/108)

On 12/18/17, g00r00 said the following...

I wasn't even aware of this possibility! I just did a quick Amazon
search and I see one for $110. I'll have to research on this more. Finding 2x USB modems that work in Windows 10, OSX, Intel Ubuntu and ARM Raspbian may or may not be trouble. It sounds like it might be possible to add POTS support for ~$200 and some loss of hair :)

And knowing is half the battle.

USB modems with Conextant controllers, which is a lot of them including a lot of off-brands, are well supported on Windows as well as Linux with the cdc-acm kernel driver. That's the type I used to test with, at least. Not sure about OSX though.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A36 2017/12/03 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Subcarrier BBS (21:2/140)

Yes but the question then of course is, can you afford to lose that hair?


g00r00 wrote:

It sounds like it might be possible to add POTS support for ~$200 and
some loss of hair :)

--- Mystic BBS/NNTP v1.12 A36 2017/12/03 (Linux/32)
* Origin: RPG Circus BBS (21:2/109)

FYI-

I had a chance to hook up the POTS lines this afternoon and you'll probably
be happy to hear that only a couple terms had the issues with scrolling off a menu screen: Telix 3.22 and Procomm 2.4.3. I have no idea what exactly it is that these terms don't like about Mystic scrolling lines past the bottom of a menu, but the issue doesn't manifest with Qmodem 4.6TD, Procomm Plus 2.01 or Telix 3.51.

Qmodem seemed to work the best out of all of them and using the board with it is exactly the same as through Netrunner or Syncterm as far as I can tell. PCPlus 2.01 and Telix 3.51 were almost the same but failed on a couple of doorgame ANSI splash screens. For example both displayed all but one LORD splash correctly, and that was the Shatterstar dragon which was misaligned. Neither of them seemed to respect the way the red dragon is indented over to the right and started drawing in the first column instead. All the other LORD splashes displayed just fine on PCPlus/Telix, indented or not. The TEOS splashes with the planet or draped red banner were a couple of others those
two couldn't deal with.

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A36 2017/12/03 (Linux/64)
* Origin: Subcarrier BBS (21:2/140)