This was officially the very first user plays user game on any BBS in Australia when using the TI-99/4A. It was a game and BBS bought from America but had a heck of a lot of bugs in it and I had to fix the code then send it back to the author. When I got it running, the game it incorporated was called "GAMEROOM" which is what you typed from the main menu to play the game.
The game was based on an original Apple (2E I believe but may not be right) game and adapted to the TI in USA. Later, it was copied by people using Commodore 64s in Australia to make a game they had for that brand of computer for BBSs and later copied by Dave Chapman of "Web BBS" to create "Kingdoms". Note that at no time was code given out but they did copy the game and write their own fresh code by watching it.
I was known to write code to imitate the Sysop interrupting and would change it from time to time. One memorable one was when I asked people to try option "G" for me and hit "Y" quickly. On most BBSs, "G" was "Goodbye" as in "hang up" and "Y" was the confirmation that you wanted to do this. Naturally, I would get annoyed replies from this but hey if you cant annoy someone with good fun once in a while, what is the use?
I also graduated to writing code on Amigas and would often write a utility and compile it for my own use. Some of those things got to become international long before Internet was a big thing. The BBS was on a program called "Tag BBS" on the Amiga for a short while. In that time, the "Top 10 Lists" were written by me, sent to the author of the BBS from where it had thousands of downloads in USA over the course of the next few months. To get it there required I ring direct from Australia to USA using my, then, 2400BPS modem.
Like all good ideas, the idea of having a game attached to a BBS went wild and soon we had Tradewars and much better games available. However, before they came out, Gameroom caused my BBS to get around 40 calls a day which wasnt bad considering that I allowed new users 30 minutes and no gameroom access, normal users 45 minutes and gameroom access and regulars 1 hour and gameroom access. Gameroom had its own timer which was different from the BBS times and had a "3 kills per day" rule where if you initiated the fight and died 3 times in one day, you couldnt get back in until the next day. All this was in TEXT of course. I also had only ONE line for the BBS, the house and everything. This made it rather hard to call out on occasion.
The BBS also had a "Regulars only" room that you didnt know existed until you were a regular and that was called "Get Stuffed!" in which anything could be said and so on and no-one held it against you. It was the original room of that sort later copied by another BBS and that BBS names "Life, The Universe and Everything" and when Fido became the next big thing then went on to become "LTUAE".
Imagine that TI-99/4A though. 2 x DS/DD 5.25 inch floppy disk drives each capable of holding 360K of data and all running with 16K of ram on the motherboard of the TI and another 32K expansion ram in the expansion box to which the TI computer was attached. CP/M programmers couldnt understand how all that could happen in that environment given the game seemed so HUGE. The simple answer was that when the user went from the BBS to the GAMEROOM, that loaded that program and when the user exited the GAMEROOM, that loaded the BBS. It took a good 8 minutes to reload the BBS for the next caller because in exiting, I wrote code to update the ladder on the BBS, update the user account for number of calls today, look for old and unused accounts and clean them up on the gameroom and the BBS. While all of this would happen in a flash today, the TI-99/4A ran its EXTENDED BASIC from a GROM Module which in effect loaded an interpreter on top of what was there. It was also only 4.77Mhz. Oh and no basic COMPILER, either! These were the days when "hcker" meant someone who put their own computer together and/or wrote their own code. While I didnt do any computer building back then, I did write a heck of a lot of code.
Thanks for reading this. For you who know my name and the breed of dogs that I love, use the plural of the breed name for the username and the ISP is westnet.com.au if you want to email me. Believe it or not, I still have the working Amiga 2000/030 with BBS still set up on it from all that time ago though it hasnt been used since 1998. 700meg SCSI HD in it!
Greg.