On 22 Dec 18 10:27:49, G00R00 said the following to Atreyu:
You can't win! When its something they want, its easy. When its something you're working on it, its stupid or too hard. I originally was going to mak an IREX replacement instead of building all of this stuff into Mystic but people on FidoNet "talked me out of it" by telling me that I couldn't do it, that it was too hard to do, etc.
Oh man you lucked out by NOT writing an Irex replacement. That it
something pretty much *every* long-time Sysop wants. But the problem is
that something like that is really a complex program to support. The biggest thing that turned me away from doing that, was for the reason that if it does not work the first time, Sysops would just say "It sucks", not appreciating what it is that is trying to be accomplished.
When I took over the D'Bridge code from the original author in 2004/2005, I was handed quite the task of even removing MS-DOS Share support (don't ask), and then how do I make it do Binkd? I must have spent MANY nights trying to figure out the best way. Then I decided to take the path of least resistance - Just "wedge" it between the existing mailer Queue and the open-source BinkD. Simply put, D'Bridge just ships with whatever the current/stable version of BinkD for Win32 or OS/2. I took the path of least resistance... or drama.
It worked out nicely because, if the open-source BinkD gets updated by the Russians with new features, connection, encryption... whatever, the D'Bridge Sysop can just drop-in the replacement. The mailer Queue code that I wrote just converts the proprietary Base36 into BSO format. Thats all it does and it works flawlessly. At that point I just said "There you go, lets move onward".
When I saw the headaches you had with getting Mystic to talk to Irex, I'm like, "That poor bastard" Lol
Oh yep I know. Thats one of the offenders with me too. Not surprising I suppose. And if I am not mistaken, didn't that person not even write the tosser they just got the code afterwards and slapped their name on it in obnoxious ways? I remember giving him shit about the credits lol
That author's other job is to act as the self-appointed Nodelist Police, but thats another story. I don't like talking too much shit about others but its amusing that as much criticism I take, he (and others like him) are quick to Areafix/Allfix stuff from my system. If I'm doing such a shit job, why bother to set up a full feed?
Now its opened sourced though, and I eventually hacked just the protocols in Mystic's code similar to what you will have to do (this is where Mystic's X/ modem come from).
The one thing that was interesting when I looked at the Zmodem code in D'Bridge was that it was written with something which must have been unique for its time... Split screen chat during file transfers. The datestamp of that code I believe was 1990/1991, something like that. Not even any assembler stuff, it was pure Pascal even for the CRC32.
Atreyu
--- Renegade vY2Ka2
* Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (21:1/176)