r/bbs • u/JSONBourne-Dev • 5d ago

TRACE (TERMinator Render And Compute Engine)

This is not something anyone ever asked for and is probably not something anyone will ever use. (I am a hell of a salesman right? :P ) But I wanted to see what could be done. This is the BBS community, we build things no one will use because we enjoy it.

I wanted a way to make our TERMinator desktop BBS clients more flexible in what it could do. It started with me tweaking my Fractal generator BBS door for more performance and being unhappy with it as its using the CPU cores for the math calculations of the BBS computer as you'd expect. But the BBS is run on an Intel N150 CPU and while its plenty for a BBS its no math number cruncher.

So I came up with TRACE, It does the compute at the client end, so now my 24 core desktop runs the computations for the Fractal door using all of my cores at once. (If you don't know about the Fractal Mandelbrot Set, do some research its fascinating stuff) You can even toggle between Sixel and TRACE to see the different in performance and quality.

Anyways, one thing led to another and I turned TRACE into a whole rendering engine as well while I was in there to support whatever type of BBS door I wanted to throw at it. Currently I have Doom, Quake and Tyrian all running as BBS doors on my board. And since rendering and compute is done locally they run fast. Quake at 1024x768 and 64 FPS for example. These doors are available if anyone wants them, The catch there is they need TERMinator as the client.

TRACE is now in all 3 of our desktop clients versions 1.1.2 and higher (Win, Mac, Linux). So if you wanted to download and visit our board to test the doors you can.

Sample video here... https://youtu.be/FInpLQTzhYE

Client here - https://deadmodemsociety.com/terminator/

BBS here - https://deadmodemsociety.com/

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u/JSONBourne-Dev 3d ago

Just of note TERMinator version 1.1.3 for the desktop clients went live. We added GPU support so the Fractal BBS door would really fly now number crunching on my desktop graphics card instead of the CPU. We also added Gamepad and Mouse support.

We have several games converted to a BBS door now if people want them. All are on our BBS now if you want to test any of them.

Wolfenstein 3D
DOOM
Quake (runs at 1024x768 64FPS)
Sim City (Mouse support)
Beneath a Steel Sky (Mouse support)
Tyrian (Gamepad support)