| Author: | Garry Dolley |
|---|---|
| Date: | 04-24-2021 |
Well, well, here we are...
After almost 25 years since I started to write the first version of SyncChat, back in 1995, I'm releasing its code to the world in its entirety, at least from what I could find in my archives.
The last working version was released around 1997, for DOS and OS/2 (I think),
and I think it was v2.7 or 2.8, or something like that. I started to work on
the code again in 2004, probably trying to get it to compile on Linux, but I
don't recall what ultimately came of that effort. That would have become v3.0,
and judging from the copyright banner in the current syncchat.c, it was in
alpha state at the time.
Fast forward another decade or so, and I had started the open source process, but I abandoned the task for one reason or another; I probably just got too busy with ARP Networks, traveling, or couldn't figure out how to get this thing to compile again after another 10 years of it sitting in the dust. Also, if I'm being totally honest, the code is downright embarrassing. I'm still surprised to this day that it ran so well, and that there are still people who occasionally email me for a registration code. I wrote SyncChat during the years when I was 15 to 17 years old, and at the time I thought I knew how to do some decent C coding; but now, looking at how I had bastardized strings and the lack of anything resembling responsible memory management, I'm reminded why I didn't release this code sooner.
So, for better or for worse, here it is. I don't remember how to compile
SyncChat in its current state. There is a Makefile.gnu that I seem to
recall working, and I had it compiling on Linux, but I'm not sure if I ever got
it running within Synchronet, at the time. Looking at a small script named
publish.sh leads me to believe I indeed got the binary compiled. In DOS, I
think it'll still compile with makefile.tcc, as is, if you have Turbo C++
3.0, but obviously that is ancient and why would you even do that.
Another issue might be character encoding. We used ANSI codes a lot back in the DOS days. They don't look right when I view the source code on my Arch Linux laptop. Might be a simple fix, or maybe not...
I'm happy to finally have this out there. I've been encouraged to open source this project for a long time and am glad I've at long last gone through with it. Feel free to contact me and tell me about your BBS, life, compilation troubles or if you want to chat over a beer 😆
To create a registration code:
$ make reggie ... $ ./reggie
and then follow the prompts.
Garry C. Dolley
gdolley [at] NO👀SPAM- arpnetworks.com
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This README is formatted in reStructredText [RST]. It has the best correlation between what a document looks like as plain text vs. its formatted output (HTML, LaTeX, etc...). What I like best is, markup doesn't look like markup, even though it is.
| [RST] | http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html |
Copyright (c) 1995, 2021 Garry C. Dolley
Released under the MIT license.