That's so funny you posted this here cause I was just playing around with seeing if DOSBox (even though it's not meant to) could run old BBS host software.

BBS & DOSBOX
Connecting to a BBS through the internet via DOSBox isn't really worth it. What you want to do is just download SyncTERM (http://syncterm.bbsdev.net/) and run that as a normal program on your PC. There are a few websites that list active BBS' like http://telnetbbsguide.com/ which actually has an HTML5 ANSI Terminal to connect to the BBS with.

OLD ANSI/TEXT GAMES
You don't really need to connect to a BBS to find old text games, they are all over the internet, you just need to know where to find them. Archive.org has a ton of old 90's shareware cd ISOs you can download.

TRADEWARS AND OTHERS
BBS Door games were text games hosted on the BBS which you played when you connected to the BBS. Tradewars was one of these. When you find a BBS to connect to, they will usually have a bunch of these games.

USB
Using USB on an old PC that didn't have any sort of built in USB may be a hard thing to do. What are the specs of those computers? What operating systems are they running? If you have PCI and Windows you can easily buy a PCI USB card. If you're talking DOS that is a lot more work and not really worth it. Either way it's much easier to just use a network card and get on the network to copy files to/from the old PC.

Hi, many years ago I connected a few times to a BBS. Mainly for looking for drivers and such.
Most of these games those BBSes ran had an sysop- or test-mode, so they were in theory also playable on a computer.
I think I also played Trade Wars, at least the pictures I found look familiar.
If you want to play with others you need the online version, of course.
Maybe you can still connect with your old terminal program or computer to it, if you use your modern computer as a bridge
or something.
To connect your computers you can use a nullmodem cable (serial) or a laplink cable (parallel).
But BBS games do run better via nullmodem. Such a cable can be easily found or made. You can also use it for file transfer later on.

Edit: @Thraka Sorry, I didn't notice your post. I guess we were writing at the same time.. 😅

No worries man 😀

Last time I looked into the bbs stuff, there was some software based on Renegade called Mythic I think. It supported dial up and telnet connections, and could also generate door drop files like door.sys for launching door games. Not sure if there's anything newer and better, but it was pretty cool a few years ago. For some reason I'm thinking WWIV or Worldgroup bbs software was possibly getting an update?

I'm not sure what exactly this thread is about, so I'll just comment on 2 things:
-You don't need dosbox (or dos) to connect to a BBS. Most, if not all, are nowadays accessible via telnet. http://telnetbbsguide.com/ is a good place to discover them (mine is listed as well!). Just don't use Windows telnet client but something like mTelnet.
-In the same logic, you don't need telnet-supporting BBS software to bring your BBS online. You can just use a telnet proxy, which waits for telnet hits from the internet and passes them translated to the BBS software. Practically you can host a BBS using almost any BBS software and make it available over the internet. This is what I'm doing with my BBS also, running in RemoteAccess which never natively supported telnet connections.

DOSBox supports an emulated modem, so in theory you could start a BBS program in one instance of DOSBox and then run a terminal program in another instance of DOSBox. Instead of connecting to a phone number, you just specify the IP address (so to connect to 127.000.000.1, you would instruct the terminal program to "dial" 1270000001). But this is not typical DOSBox usage and might not work very well, and there are so many better methods as discussed above.

Niezgodka wrote:

- have some retro computers with no USB. I want to connect it with cable. What program I should use on 286 to do that? How fast is the transfer? What cable I should get? I'm confused, with male, female LPT parell RS... can you guys link me to particular auction on ebay?
😕

Serial communication with a null modem cable is probably easiest. It is also possible to do transfers over a parallel cable (and the transfers should be slightly faster, too), but the software for doing so is less common. Or you can just get an ISA Ethernet card for your 286, but setting up the drivers isn't always straightforward. You may want to consider getting a floppy drive "emulator", which will let your 286 read floppy disk images stored on an SD card.

Can't you just use Telnet to connect to outside BBS's, which comes with pretty much every version of Windows since Win95, I believe? You do have to enable it, manually before you can use it in Windows 7, but it's still there. I used to use Telnet to connect to BBS's and play L.O.R.D.! Lots of fun.

I don't recall if you need to open ports on your router for it to be friendly or not.