Daniel_Roedding@fiction.ms.sub.org (03/09/91)
saj@chinet.chi.il.us (Stephen Jacobs) writes: > I'm toying with the possibility of setting up a product support bbs (no, the > product isn't out yet). Being an eternal optimist (I still use Atari stuff, > don't I?), I'm curious about how I'd go to multiple lines if that was > necessary. You speak 'bout "setting up": Do you want to write such a program yourself? > It seems like a question that might be asked fairly often. So given ST rather > than Mega E or TT hardware, is there a good way to set up a multi-line BBS? > The best IBM PC multi-lines seem to use multiple networked machines. Is a > suitable networking product available in the US? Is there a good way to get > multiple serial ports on an ST? It is possible to patch the MIDI port to behave as a 2nd RS232. Furthermore, there exist adapter cards for the MegaBus with up to 8 additional RS232 lines. Writing the software isn't a very large problem. Take a little multitasking module (with on-demand switching, that's really enough), then you can write a mailbox software that doesn't know that it is run multiple times. It's only important that each task must NOT make assumptions about the size of a netboard etc., since this can change every moment. In the worst situations, you'll have to put some semaphore checks into the code, but that isn't the problem. I did it ... my system works with a multitasking shell (with a new file system, I think I wrote about it) -- the kernel isn't that large you may assume. You could put some BBS source at the top of this program, I guess it wouldn't be larger than 20 K or so :-) It's really no problem if you are willed to change programming style and throw away the ******* [censored] GEMDOS. Daniel