From: htoaster@yabbs
To: slohack@yabbs
Subject: re: yabbs ports
Date: Thu Jul 21 13:13:05 1994
In message yabbs ports, slohack said:
>     Is anybody working on a dos port of yabbs..would be kinda neat.  If 
> nobody is I might take a look at the code and see what would need to be 
> done.  I guess implenting the sockets on a dos machine would be the 
> hard part to implement.  The old yabbs would probably be the easiest port 
> but I've never seen it(not as good as the newest probably) since it 
> doesn't use sockets.  

It depends on what you want to get out of a dos port.  This system would
be hard to make into your traditional dos based bbs system.  If you were 
looking for something like that I'd recommend throwing BSD or Linux on the
machine and running yabbs under that.  It will even let you do useful
stuff with the machine while yabbs is running, which you can't do under DOS 
(unless you run OS/2 or Windows NT).  

If you want to do a DOS port of the client that is another story.  Doing a
dos based version that ran over a network would be trviail, there are just
a few things you would have to change in the yabbslib module (which is where
all of the networking is) and replace the termcap code with something more 
suitable for DOS.  If you want to do a modem based port it would be a little
more work, but still probably not too tricky.  You'd probably want to write 
the code to have them modem dial into the persons network access point, 
act as a simple term program until they get to someplace they can telnet to
the yabbs server from, and then start the actual client from there...The
protocl is designed so that it can run over more than just sockets (it is
streams based, so running over a modem would be okay)...  Either port would
take a bit of work, but would be doable.

I'd stay away from the old yabbs code unless you want to see what yabbs was for
historical reasons or something.

alex