“MuffinTerm”: A great new terminal app for BBSing on iPhone, iPad, and Mac

I have been contemplating this actually. An opportunity for a lot of fun IMHO and ”page sysop” could use haptics :P

Not quite the same thing, but I wrote BBS door games back in the day and I keep thinking about writing one today for the iPhone, with ANSI art and all.

I’ve played around with iSH on the iPhone and you can definitely run a server in the background, but there are some fairly major caveats. Background apps are severely throttled compared to the foreground app (so you can access your basic web server from Safari on the same iPhone, but it’s not very fast). You also need to give the background app location permissions so iOS keeps it running. If you jailbroke your iPhone then it would probably be much easier.

Easy there, tiger.

> Not yet—but perhaps in a future update…!

There's SyncTerm.

From the FAQ:

Is MuffinTerm really “calling” a BBS, like over a telephone? Will this use minutes on my telephone plan or anything?

No, MuffinTerm connects to the BBS over the Internet, using your device’s network (data) connection; the term “calling” is just retained from the modem era. (There are still some BBSes that offer actual dial-in over a telephone line; but MuffinTerm doesn’t use such hardware.)

Wait, I did something and it definitely made telephone sounds.

Ahhhh, you didn’t believe me and tried typing in an old ATDT call string, didn’t you. Well, despite the sounds that you heard, it’s still not really dialing out on a telephone. But you can perhaps relive a bit of old times that way. :)

Termux has ANSI color support.