A vintage BBS system running RBBS-PC on MS-DOS. Reachable via telnet or ssh at bitwoods.duckdns.org.
The system is powered by Intel 8086 emulator called tinyxt which is a custom fork of 8086tiny. Compared to e.g. QEMU the emulator provides an order of magnitude faster emulation while using minimal system resources. The memory requirements are very close to that of an original 8086 PC. Part of the emulation is implemented as BIOS code running on the 8086 side.
Also tinyxt provides an accurate UART emulation with carrier detection etc. making it possible to run vintage BBS software smoothly over IP. Experiments have been made using an original 8086 hardware with 16550 UART and 1980s telecommunications software. Xmodem transfer works reliably close to a line rate from Bitwoods over cellular internet.
Last updated: 2023-12-25 18:07 (EET)