THC BBS
Tommy's
Holiday
Camp
BBS

THC BBS operates on the traditional lands of the Lkwungen (Songhees), Xwsepsum (Esquimalt) and Wsanec (Saanich) families and ancestors. Hay'sxw'qa si'em!

C-64 Russian Text Fonts!

Finally released nearly 40 years later!

If you've been following us on Bluesky (@thcbbs.bsky.social) then you've seen our "THC C-64 Russian Class" content. And some may be wondering, how on earth did we get Russian letters on the screen of a decidedly Cold-war era Western computer?

The answer is custom text fonts. This tool in the Commodore 64's impressive hardware swiss army knife lets you change the pixel arrangement of every glyph in the text font on the 64! This is used extensively in video games on the 64 that you might think are in high-resolution graphics but are actually in text mode.

To produce the C-64 Russian Classes, we use two such fonts. One of them was first developed by the THC SysOp back in the 1980s before THC even existed! This is the "Soviet" font, which has a video-game-y look and is still our favourite. The other, "Putin", was developed this year (2024) and uses the standard Commodore 64 text font as a model for the Cyrillic characters.

And, because this is how we roll, you can download and use these fonts yourself - they are freeware!

To use, load with ,8,1 e.g. LOAD "SOVIET5",8,1
Then POKE 53272,28

That's it!

Locating a suitable font editor is an exercise left to the reader.

Download: RussianFonts.d64
ZIP: RussianFonts.zip

Key Mappings:

Enjoy!

Social Media Update

We have, after over a year of careful consideration, made the difficult decision to leave X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter. We have found that the new ownership group's values are seriously at odds with ours, and that no matter how much we may have loved Twitter before this, it was no longer a welcome place for us or our followers.

To that end, we have today (December 7, 2024) completed our migration to Bluesky, a new platform that is reminiscent of early Twitter. It's growing very rapidly (by some reports, a million users a day at one point recently) and we would love to see you there!

Follow us at thcbbs.bsky.social - we'll follow you back*!

(*) We'll follow you back if you're not a porn bot, a spammer, or toxic out of the gate...

Visit our telnet BBS!

No telnet client required.

Blue Board

The fastest Commdore 64 BBS

Blue Board was developed in the summer of 1985 in Vancouver by Martin Sikes. Built in 100% Assembly Language, it's the fastest BBS software ever released for Commodore 64. We ran it for the first two years of our existence.

Martin, sadly, passed away in 2007 leaving no apparent intellectual property successor for Blue Board, which is now widely regarded as abandonware.

There is a project and website dedicated to preserving Blue Board at www.blueboardbbs.com and we hope you will visit that site and learn more about this remarkable piece of proto-social-networking history.

Perhaps most prescient of all Martin's innovations was Blue Board's "Scribbles" feature, a short-format high-volume pseudo-chatwall that no other BBS duplicated but that was largely plagiarized in early versions of Twitter years later.

While we do not have an "official" release of Blue Board to share, we can share two versions of the modified software that we used along with our departed colleage Allen Walker and his BBS, Crazy Train.

Here they are.

  • Blue Board 1.2 as used on Crazy Train BBS
  • Blue Board 3.0+ with cleaned up prompts, not as used on THC-BBS
  • Blue Board 3.0+ with both CHANGER and CHANGER2 and TransCom TCM-1200 Modem driver, as used on THC BBS. Immature AF.
  • Blue Board Condensed documentation. IMPORTANT: THIS FILE IS THE ONLY SUPPORT WE WILL PROVIDE.
  • Hi-Q BBS Door!

    First update since 1997!

    Hi-Q is the BBS Door version of the classic pegboard game of the same name. Can you get a perfect score? It's harder than it looks!
    Requires: a BBS capable of running 16-bit MS-DOS doors. DORINFOx.DEF, DOOR.SYS, CALLINFO.BBS, and PCBOARD.SYS supported.

    License: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 3.0. You may use and distribute this door commercially or non-commercially but you may not publish derivative works. Required attribution: THC BBS
    Please note:Hi-Q's license terms have changed. The Creative Commons license applies only to Hi-Q 1.4.0 and later. Hi-Q 1.30 and prior versions remain shareware and remain governed by the licence terms set out when they were published.

    Yertle - the BBS Door!

    Our first new BBS door since 2022!

    Our 6-letter reimagining of Wordle, the logical word game that broke the internet!
    Requires: a BBS capable of running 16-bit MS-DOS doors. DORINFOx.DEF, DOOR.SYS, CALLINFO.BBS, and PCBOARD.SYS supported.

    License: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 3.0. You may use and distribute this door commercially or non-commercially but you may not publish derivative works. Required attribution: THC BBS

    Myrtle - the BBS Door!

    Our first new BBS door since 1996!

    Our BBS Door take on Wordle, the logical word game that is breaking the internet!
    Requires: a BBS capable of running 16-bit MS-DOS doors. DORINFOx.DEF, DOOR.SYS, CALLINFO.BBS, and PCBOARD.SYS supported.

    License: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 3.0. You may use and distribute this door commercially or non-commercially but you may not publish derivative works. Required attribution: THC BBS

    Myrtle for Commodore 64!

    Our vintage take on Wordle, the logical word game that is breaking the internet!
    Requires: Commodore 64 or emulator.

    License: Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0. You may use and distribute this game commercially or non-commercially. Required attribution: THC BBS

    Doorgasm '98 CD-ROM

    Our last CD-ROM as a BBS. This is a collection of all the BBS doors we could find as of 1998. We used to sell this for $30 but it's yours for the cost of a few hundred megs of download bandwidth now!

    File size: 556,221,549 bytes. License: Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0 You may use and distribute this archive commercially or non-commercially.