BBS DOOR

A 'BBS door' was a mechanism to execute and communicate with an external program, commonly a game on bulletin board systems (commonly referred to as 'door games').
The BBS software would start the external program, and the door system would pass data back and forth between the door program, the BBS, and the remote user. To supply the door program with the user's information (such as the user's alias and the amount of time they had spent online), the BBS software would create a dropfile containing information for the program to read. A few door programs including Front Line operated the opposite way, as Front Doors, answering the modem and then giving control to the BBS software. This method was particularly commonplace for hubs of networks.
FOSSIL was a popular communications hardware/software interface standard used by MS-DOS compatible BBS software and door programs which has helped these legacy programs remain compatible with modern communications technologies such as Telnet and Rlogin.
While many of the most popular and memorable BBS doors were games, numerous doors had non-entertainment applications such as user polls or the time bank, permitting users to time-shift their rationed BBS use. Frequently they would act as a front-end to themed databases on subject such as astrology, numerology and fortune-telling, recipes, weather prediction, personal ads (sometimes with additional match-making functionality), classified ads and "for sale" listings (sometimes permitting auctions), BBS lists and parting comments from the most recent BBS callers.
Prodoor provided a different message editor for use with the PCBoard messagebase. Many doors including Markmail and Qmail provided QWK functionality for convenient use with offline readers. Sysops who were away from the BBS computer sometimes called in and used DOORWAY by Marshall Dudley, which could run many DOS programs by modem, including file managers, DOS prompt, and the specialized editing programs that administered the BBS.

Contents

Popular door games

External links

Popular door games

★ The Arcadian Legends ★ Arrowbridge I and II ★ BarneySplat! ★ Barren Realms Elite (BRE) ★ BBS Crash ★ Bordello ★ Cripple Smash ★ Death Masters ★ Dominions ★ The Dragon's Hoard ★ DrugWars ★ Esterian Conquest ★ Exitilus ★ Falcon's Eye ★ Falcon's Honor

★ Food Fight ★ Geopolitics ★ Global Wars ★ Illusions ★ Indy Speedway (Animated Auto Racing) ★ Kannons and Katapults ★ King of the Hill Trivia ★ Land of Devastation (LOD) ★ Leech ★ Legend of the Red Dragon I and (LORD) ★ Modern Warfare ★ Mutants ★ Operation Overkill ★ PimpWars ★ The Pit

★ ★ Saratoga Raceway (Animated Horse Racing) ★ Solar Realms Elite (SRE) ★ Space Dynasty ★ Super Solitaire ★ Swords of Chaos ★ Top Rank Boxing (Animated Boxing Championships) ★ TradeWars 2002 (tradewars game server is still used by non bbs users to play online) ★ UltraSoft Animated Backgammon (UABG) ★ Usurper ★ VGA Planets (technically a Play-by-mail game) ★ Voyeur ★ Yankee Trader

External links

★ The BBS Organization's BBS related doorgames,files,faqs

★ Legend of the Red Dragon Homepage

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★ Cheepware BBS Doors/Sysop Utilities

★ UltraSoft Home Site - Door Games, Shareware & Freeware

★ BBSFiles.com - BBS Files, Door Games, Utilities & Forums available