It turns out that the emulator Hatari has an option to emulate the Atari’s serial port. Could I somehow connect to a BBS using an Atari terminal in emulation? I no longer own my Atari 520ST and 1040STe, so using actual hardware was not an option. It supported VT-52 as well as plain ASCII, but not ANSI.
I’ve been thinking about Space Empire Elite, one of the first BBS door games I ever played. Since I was mostly calling PC boards in those days, I used a terminal program called “ANSIterm” which could display ANSI graphics on the Atari ST using special tricks. PC BBSes with their colorful ANSI graphics were dominant in the early to mid-1990s, while Atari BBSes were dying out. PC clones, however had an 80×25 mode with 16 colors and special graphics characters. Atari’s VT-52 mode offered only 4 colors in medium resolution. But I seldom used the ST’s native terminal mode: VT-52.
When I was a kid calling BBSes, I used an Atari ST computer. Please read my new tutorial on how to telnet to a BBS using a terminal inside the Hatari emulator. UPDATE (): In the years since I wrote this blog post, I have found some ways to improve this process.
