Connecting to BBSes

Gone are the days of dialing BBSes and listening to the grind and whine of the modem. Instead now you can connect with telnet BBSes using several native terminals on the Commodore. We will cover that later. Here we will cover the ways you can connect to Commodore BBSes, like ours, from a native Mac, Windows or Linux client. This page is a work in progress and will be updated as needed.

Thanks to the excellent 1200 baud blog for much of this!

You can download a pre-compiled mirror of CGTerm version 1.6 hosted here:

cgterm-1.6-macosx.tar.gz (37849 downloads ) (CG Term for Mac)

CGTerm 1.6 for Windows (36657 downloads ) CGTerm 1.6 Source Code (36895 downloads )

CGTerm is an open source client which allows for true PETSCII translation so you can see Commodore/Color 64 sites in all their glory. Once you fire it up just press ESC then D and enter the address. Addresses are entered as such:

address (space) port

So Oasis BBS would be oasisbbs.hopto.org 6400. See the screenshot:

I have been having problems compiling the latest version of CGTerm for macOS Mojave but I am working to get that fixed. I’ll post an update when we get there.

Connecting with Windows

We are working on getting a Windows version of CGTerm up and running Until then, here are a couple of ways you can connect:

Enabling Telnet in Windows 10 and using PuTTY

Read and do the stuff here to enable Telnet in Windows 10.

First, download and install PuTTY.

Open it. You will find it in your Start Menu if you did things right.

 

You really don’t need to change anything in the settings. Now go to the search box and type “cmd.exe”

At the next prompt type this:

u localecho

This turns off local echo so when you type “username” it does’t come out as “uusseerrnnaammee” in your terminal.

Log on:

o tfcbbs.com 6400

That’s “o” as in “o”pen a connection to tfcbbs.com port 6400.

You’re connected!

And yes, your terminal supports ANSI. Enjoy!

MobaXTerm

Someone on Reddit mentioned they used a very versatile terminal called MobaXTerm. Download it here and run the installer.

Fire it up and make one change:

Change the Telnet client to Cygwin Telnet. Also make sure to enter the address and port.

One note about using MobaXTerm: You need to hit return at all prompts. It’s just something about it.

Native Linux Telnet

The great thing about Linux is you can just fire up a terminal and enter “telnet tfcbbs.com 6400” and be connected. And it supports ANSI!