fsxNet's Ghosts & Glitches: When the Dead Dial Back Well well. fsxNet's been coughing up more echoes of the old days than a crypt phone line in a thunderstorm--specifically, the sudden revival of x/84, which seems to have shuffled back from the dead like some kind of digital Lazarus. I've watched it die and resurrect so many times I've lost count, but this time the chatter around it feels different.

Less nostalgia, more defiance. Someone posted a log of the BBS's door game history--30 years of high scores, password files, and what looks like a very unsecured backup of the original SysOp's personal correspondence. Either this is the most transparent necromancy in BBS history, or someone's trolling with a floppy disk and a grudge.

Either way, I'm in. Then there's GODS69, because of course there is. The name alone guarantees at least three sysops will ban each other before sunrise, but the thread's actual content is fascinating--a debate over whether modern BBS software (looking at you, ENiGMA 1/2) is "cheating" by emulating classic hardware too closely.

One poster argued that running Amiga doors on a modern system is like printing the on a laserjet: sure, it's the same text, but the aura is gone. Another fired back with a screenshot of CrNet BBS running under WWIV 5. 0, which--let's be honest--looks like someone mixed a CRT in a blender with a dream.

The sheer audacity of nostalgia as a middleware argument is almost beautiful. Speaking of WWIV, the update thread is either a love letter or a war cry. The devs dropped a new beta that finally supports UTF-8 natively, which is either progress or heresy depending on whether you still run a BBS with a 300-baud modem as a statement.

The real drama, though, is the backlash from purists who claim this "kills the soul of the network. " Soul? Please. The soul of WWIV died the second someone added a GIF viewer.

But hey, at least the TheForze files section is still pumping out ANSI art that'd make a 1989 demo scene member weep with joy. Now, the Mystic Realms and Looney Bin threads are where things get interesting. Both are running ANSI like it's 1993, but with a twist: Looney Bin seems to have a door game that only works if you're logged in as "Guest" from a Commodore 64. I tried it from a modern terminal, and it just laughed at me and hung up.

Mystic Realms, meanwhile, has a sysop who posts cryptic hex dumps of old BBS graffiti from the 1980s and dares anyone to reverse-engineer them. That's the kind of challenge that used to get people to spend weekends in Debug--back when "hacking" wasn't a verb with legal consequences. And then there's the CrNet BBS thread, which is less a discussion and more a time capsule. Someone dug up a 1996 message board where the hottest topic was whether Netscape Navigator was "the end of the BBS era.

" The comments are a masterclass in 90s hubris--"The internet will kill modems! " "Why would anyone want to read text in a browser when they can have ANSI colors? " I love it.

But the real question is: What's next? The ENiGMA 1/2 Amiga doors are cool, but is anyone actually using them? And will TheForze's files section survive if the last Amiga owner unplugs their machine?

The network feels like it's standing at the edge of a cliff--one side is progress (UTF-8, emulation, new users), the other is dogma (modems, pure ASCII, "the old way"). I'm not sure which side I'm on, but I do know this: if x/84 keeps coming back, we're either in a simulation or the universe has a sick sense of humor. So--who's running what these days?

Anyone actually using these doors, or is everyone just watching the ghosts dance? And more importantly: If you could resurrect one dead BBS, which would it be--and why? (Mine's got Amiga 1000 in the title.

You're welcome.

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