My 386. My first PC, I don’t have exact specifications for what the original version of the machine was. However, a few years down the road Mom and Dad wanted me to jot everything down for insurance purposes.

 

I will come back to this list a lot, because it covers the hardware for the BBS time period.

So A 386dx, not intel though, Cyrix.

Cyrix was another chip manufacturer back then. Getting it wasn’t a conscious thing that we did, it was just the chip that T&D, the store Mom and Dad ordered the computer built from, used when making it. Initially I don’t think we even knew there was any sort of difference or makes. As time based though I wore not having a Intel chip on my sleeve as some sort of defiance against the man.

It was a weird time, and pirating software to “put it” to Microsoft, or not buying Intel because the other brands were “better”, was a thing kids in our generation might do. I don’t actually remember what the pros and cons of the Cyrix versus the Intel equivalent at the time were anymore. I will say this though the chip never failed and the PC was solid through all the years. Spoiler alert, the PC chugged on for years, even into having newer PCs, where it eventually failed was in the Keyboard controller, which is one of the saddest ways to go out.

Now the 400MB hard drive and newer video cards I don’t think were part of the original build. In fact I pretty clearly remember the first hard drive in the PC being 100 megabytes. For whatever reason that was a important number to hit for me when we built the PC. I am guessing that Mom’s probably had like 80 and I just thought that too small.

Video back then when we got the computer was not a concern. The PC could do SVGA, which was way better than Sam’s EGA display. It was such a monumental difference to go from 16 colors to 256 SVGA back then that I still feel like that was the most drastic display difference change ever. While more modern stuff is way more powerful, and the outputs are gorgeous.  Each step is not as drastic an eye improvement for me than going from 16 to 256. That was the difference between ones eyes hurting after an hour of play and having computer graphics that look like what they are supposed to look like that don’t hurt your eyes.

Then we got some what felt like standard needs. 8 megabytes for RAM would happily go on with the computer until it’s controller died. And the Touch monitor would actually outlive everything and live onto the next century. Humorously becoming a relic of a different time, when hardware could be fixed with a little slap. As in, eventually that monitors red spectrum would fail, but I proper smack to the right spot on the top of the monitor would realign everything and bring red back into the world.

So that stock Cyrix 386 with 8 megs and Ram and the 100 megabyte hard drive was our starting point. That is when we get to it going from the cute little machine to play Civ and SimCity on. That 386 would put in work. Actual real work.

I don’t remember how early on I started running my own BBSs on it, but it feels like it wasn’t long after the initial purchase.

Graham. So with the first computer came friends that lived near by that were into computers in the early 1990s. One such kid was Graham. He lived on a street right behind the L street house and was a year behind me in school. In seventh grade to my eighth, I am guessing that Chris K. had some intervention in letting him know I had a new PC. With that Graham came over to inspect the setup.

With that inspection Graham found I had no way to connect to his BBS running on his computer out of his house. I am guessing out of a want to have more users his BBS he happened to have a 1200 baud modem he was no using. My guess here is that he had his 2400 baud modem the BBS was running on, which was an upgrade to this one. So he installed the modem, and a copy of a program called Telix.

From Telix I could plug the home line into the 1200 baud bad boy and dail up Graham’s phone number and login to Black Horizon’s BBS.

Luckily a picture a friend made for that BBS in 1994 still exists on, on the internet. The tone of the image though doesn’t really match the BBS. Graham’s BBS was a thirteen year old kids BBS. It had a couple of the free Door games, I think it had Fido net and then a file base upkept by him and the eight or so of us in that age range that go into having BBSs.

I will say this though, it was consistently there and was the same. As we will come to find, I would make a BBS run it for a year, take a break and start a new, albeit with the same software and computer and really just the same BBS rebranded, but Graham kept his BBS the same, just changed his BBS nickname from time to time to reflect his changes I guess.

Now this 1200 baud modem. Graham had a 2400 baud modem for his BBS at this point in time. That was considered slow, but he wasn’t running a big file transfer gala. He was running a kid’s BBS with text-based games for friends for the most part. Another guy, a college guy, known on his BBS as Mav’rik had a modern 14.4, or 9600 baud modem, I don’t remember which when this was all starting up. But the crux of things is that he was hosting more files and to older people and thus had what was considered “high speed” at the time. Graham wasn’t. And we, being what would really be Me, Chris M, Chris K and Marty had his hand me down at 1200 baud.

This meant slow runnings. Now playing the games on Graham’s BBS, posting messages, sending e-mails. Tolerable. Downloading files, not good. Graham also wasn’t hosting a spectacular file base. This is were some details may span a larger portion of time then what I am specifically talking about, but here it goes.

Graham, and I think Mav, both either had CD-Rom drives working with their systems, or had access to files from CD-Roms. This was a huge deal as far as storage, because as I said I am working with a 100MB drive. CD’s could hold up to 600+ megabytes per disk, which meant one CD-Rom held more information than our three computers combined.

There was also a local computer shop at the corner of L street, about a dozen houses down the street. Oddly enough operated by a parent of another kid I was going to school with and had know since we started Spanish immersion together. Graham living on the same block and having his interest managed to get some sort of “job” but not really since when he would have been “working” there he was never above the age of fifteen. So I think he just installed things on trade probably, helped out for software. I don’t know what the arrangement was so this is all speculative.

The main point is that he had access to a computer stores ability to order stuff and so he got his hands on these large Shareware CD-Roms.

So Much Shareware! There was a series of these CD’s and I remember them. This shareware files were a lot of what we were picking off Graham’s BBS. And the downloads were instense. Mav, had some actual pirated software on his end, which was even more intense to download but is most memorable for having access to a CD called So Much Stare-ware, which was a dirty picture archive playing off the name of the popular shareware CD.

The slow downloads tied up the phone line in the house. My memory recalls that Marty and I would use the phoneline at night, presumably on a Friday or Saturday night and start downloads. Humorously it’s the amount of time it took for us to download one dirty picture that sticks with me. Marty would scan through the descriptions, we would pick one that sounded interesting then set it download. What would be instant in today’s world took at least the length of a sitcom at night to download. So we would pick some scantily clad young lady’s photograph, download it and watch TV.

For software at that point, it was pick a file, set the download, hope no one picks up the phone and have it download all night. If Dad for instance was working the suicide hotline, which was a volunteer thing he did do from time to time during the 80s and early 90s, we would have to be told to stay off the line, since other wise no calls were getting through to the L Street house as we downloaded some simple shareware game for study.

Which we did, we had a company to run! Enter Sarlacc Software and the meat of this story.

Sarlacc Software would be established in 1992. This takes us back to Civilization. Now that we had learned enough DOS to know how to do things like split the files of Civ onto two of the larger, 1.44 Megabyte sized floppy disks for pirating transport. We would also explore the files for the game Civ that were stored on the PCs hard drive. Thanks to that we learned, we found were Civ stored some of the in-game text on easily readable and editable text files. So, we started to edit those files to make the leaders of countries we didn’t like to say funny things.

QBasic, the program that would launch Sarlacc Software and BBS.

This familiarity with DOS would lead to more discoveries. The editing of the text files got us into DOS’s file editor, which led someone to discover Qbasic. Qbasic looked like the DOS text editor but was for editing BASIC script. BASIC is a simple computer programming language that I think came stock with DOS at that point for fun. There were plenty more robust ways to program by then, but DOS still had BASIC installed for the amateur enthusiast. It wasn’t the first time BASIC had been attempted in the house. We had a TI/99 which ran on basic and had a cassette tape adapter for storage that allowed amateur programmers to try their hand and writing programs. My Dad gave that a go in the late 80s for a bit. Initially Qbasic was a blast because of the fun discovery of the game Nibbles (an early version of the game Snakes game on the Nokia phones for those that lived through early cell phones) and a game called Gorillas which was just the father of games like Worms.

 Gorillas was fun and my parents played it with us from time to time. Nibbles would end up being better received when it was on the cell phone and people like say, my mother, would get caught sitting in her car alone trying to make her snake a long as possible. However, since you had to load up the game in Qbasic then compile and run it each time, you would get to see a glimpse of the code for the game. That got young minds stirring. Eventually someone would discover how to make the physics in gorillas be unpredictably predictable. This created a new gaming environment for the game where rules could be changed. It also made the idea of editing more than just a games text files seem like something more tangible. We seem just mere steps away from trying to maybe, quite possibly, create our own game.

But wait! Before hitting the next step on that route, we got back to Sam. Sam’s computer also had a DOS version of the word processor Word Perfect. Sort of the 90s grandfather of word processers, before we all started using Windows and running Word, or Google Docs, this was our document builder. Sam was also an Advanced Dungeons and Dragon (AD&D) enthusiast as were Keith Chris K., Chris M., and Marty. I though really didn’t get into it too much, especially right now since Jake didn’t exist yet. For starters I think my parents bought into the 80s hysteria that somehow AD&D was a way to introduce children into devil worship. Which shows why the media shouldn’t just run with a story, since a bunch of nerdy kids sitting around rolling dice and pretending they are essentially part of The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) is about the polar opposite of the evils kids were doing at the time. Anyway, I am straying, I also didn’t feel the vibe of the game, there was a lot of rules to learn, so much so that they would use Word Perfect to template out their characters, or at least Sam was doing so quite often.

 This would lead to my use of Word Perfect at some point to just start writing my own silly roleplaying rules to an AD&D style game. Sometimes in lieu of creating a character in actual AD&D at Sam’s house. Maybe it was just because I was on the outside looking in at all their complex rules they had to know to play, maybe it was boredom, but there I went writing up a system of stats and spells for a RPG that wasn’t set in some fantasy world, but instead set in our town, with many fantastical stuffs going on therein.

With word processors not being quite so sophisticated back then, underline, italicizing and the like weren’t displayed on screen as they would look printed, but instead would change the color when adding those items. This led to organizing sections of weapons and spells by these colors which struck a chord in me that likes organization of colors, and I went running.

 One of the first things I did was invented a stat called herbalism to go with all the basic RPG stats one thinks of like strength and constitution. Now as an adult I would see herbalism and think, oh a teenage making an AD&D style game with a stat called herbalism, they must be stoners thinking they’re being clever. This wasn’t the case. This was me putting an inside joke into the game right off the bat. This was during the great music discovery period of my life, one of the we had been introduced too was the band Primus and we all enjoyed the band. At one of the local record stores I had found a VHS tape covering Primus and three of their music videos, which we all watched, a lot. Primus had this stoic drummer in the non-music video portions (I guess occasionally in some of the music videos too) of the tape named Herb. For whatever reason that escapes me now, that was just cool and so everything was Herb. I made a statistic for our characters in a game based on our lives, and that was herbalism. It didn’t really have any deep meaning, if it had to be a relatable trait it would be sort of a coolness/luck factor for your character and was used thusly.

 Being weird with the stats I think garnered some interest from at least one of the Chrises, but when I got to describing the spells the game had, that’s when the birth of “My Game, Ryan’s Game” occurred. I started making up spells, to be different from the classic spells like fireball, and lightning bolt. They became things like summoning a Jawa from Star Wars. Then explaining what these unique spells did became a source of amusement to us all. If I recall in the case of summon Jawa, the Jawa came out, did some ridiculous action, made the Jawa “utini” (although we called the sound jenkies, kind of Scooby Doo-esque I guess) sound in some comical manner and then dissipated. Then the weapons were related to real life things and enemies were also from our little subculture, like the mysterious people living underneath the deck in the back of the L street house and so on. An actual, kind of playable game came from this very large Word Perfect file. The original file is sadly lost to time. But attempts at revising it into Word still remain in some form to this very day (2021). Anyway, the game was playable and on some occasions was played. Most noticeably with Chris K. when we went to Oregon to visit his mother during a spring break that same year or the next. That play through was done with dice and stats and everything. Then also with Marty a few times once we had gone to bed at the L street house, where we dropped the randomness of dice rolls and just let him interact within the world with me as a guide.

 But even though with Marty we proved the game could be played as an interactive story adventure it still had stats, and stats are important to RPGs. RPGs were number based anyway, stats led to Hit Points, and hit points made sense, after all they were in one of our big games of that era, Final Fantasy. So, with the discovery of Qbasic and learning how you could edit numbers in game, the next step was taken and that was the random number generator.

 I want to say Marty had got some instruction at school on BASIC, but that might have come later. It was during his time at Midtown, a junior high in town, that he seemed to be learning it. But somehow the two of us got together, probably some Friday night and figured out how to make Qbasic run a simple number generator for the eight or so stats that “My Game” had, then display them on screen with the option to reroll if you didn’t like your first series of numbers. Maybe we were simpletons, maybe it was because it was our creation, but trying to re roll over and over again until we hit the ideal set of numbers was strangely fun. And so, the idea of moving the game from pen and paper (in theory) to video game for My Game Ryan’s Game (MGRG) was born.

 Now BASIC was rather outdated by the time we started playing around with it, but it was simple and it’s what we were using since it came free with DOS. But as I started programming MGRG, eventually Marty would start on a project of his own, I don’t remember what it was. Then later Chris M. wanted to develop his own game based on Sam’s new house out in the country (he would move out from a house near the University Mall) and called it “Sam’s Mansion”. Sam’s Mansion was a text-based adventure game about going to Sam’s house which we considered to be wild times. This would officially start us on the dream of having our own in-house software brand.

  As kids get when they get into things like say software design, you seem to want to start branding your work like actual, in this case, commercial games. So, the idea of having a fictitious software company name came to be. That previous Christmas I received a copy of Super Star Wars for my Super Nintendo. When the discussion of what to name the company came up, for some reason, I thumbed through the instruction manual and pointed at the Sarlacc Pit Monster, the boss of the first level of the game, from that the name was adapted to Sarlacc Software. No real meaning behind it, we just as a group thought it sounded right.

The mighty Sarlacc pit monster picture from the Super Star Wars instruction booklet

That was a close predecessor to the launch of the Sarlacc BBS. With the software “company” the idea of needing a branded BBS came up. The BBS would be running on the Renegade BBS software, another item we received from Graham and the same software he was using for his BBS. I believe it was free to use which was the main reason we used it, but either way it offered a lot to maintain, and we were satisfied for the time being. This was then the point where Marty started to use the handle(nickname) Sarlacc so he could be associated with our company. We were in business now, we had a software company, and everyone had their projects they were working on.

The BBS, our company’s online presence was also running on that 1200 baud modem. This was a mess. We had to work out some major issues with a slow BBS on a voice line. One of the first things I got then was a dedicated phone line for the BBS.

Mom seemed very impressed with our Software aspirations. In fact Mom was pushing for us to go find out how to register our companies name with the County. With the belief that we might actually produce something sellable. Now I think we were using a copywritten name, which means who knows how that would have worked out. But my mom being somehow who has run multiple little small enterprises thought it a good idea to make us do that. We got as far as filling out the paper work once, but never turned it in with the payment.

It wasn’t the craziest idea, with internet ftp sites, BBSs and the shareware model that was prevalent at the time, if any one of us could have finished a title there might have been some opportunity there. However, as much time as we dropped into these endeavors, we were still teenage boys, we had school and other friends and other things we had to do, like fall through skylights. So, even though we keep enjoying our little software company and would talk about it and do stuff for it, we never really went all in on it, too much life to live.

That didn’t stop Mom from being okay with supporting our companies climb to the top. So when I explained why it would be better to have a dedicated phone line, it was an easy sell. Or maybe the fact was that Mom and Dad were getting tired of competing for phone time in the house, along with the fact that whenever you picked up the phone on a modem call you had to hear those terrible sounds that came through the receiver. The point being it wasn’t that hard of a sell.

756-7559. Sarlacc BBS, 1200 baud. This wasn’t a fancy system. The fact of the matter is I remember that this version of the BBS existed and that it brought about the whole era of the BBS at the L Street house. But what was on it, what we did with it, any details about it I don’t remember. 1200 baud was dreadfully slow to host with. By the time the BBS became Imperial City, the ANSI and RIP ads says 14.4Kps. So when the changeover occurred is also something I am not sure of.

But here are some things I kind of recall. I think when the BBS was still under the Sarlacc moniker Marty got a hold of an internal modem that I feel like had a weird Baud rate. But it might have just been 2400. All the modems and their rates are hard to keep track of, after 14.4 there was a 19.2, then I think I just got 56k ones after that for the rest of time. But then so many others had other weird steps in between I cant recall which were on the 7559 line pre Deathrow BBS. The point being Sarlacc BBS got us upgrading that modem that took a lifetime to download a filthy picture with. We had software to distribute and needed to move forward.

The first modem that ran the BBS, and external Intel 14.4.

We also needed to host files. Looking at software release dates this had to have been somewhere in the run of Sarlacc and TiT0rS. But the 100 Megabyte hard drive wasn’t getting what I needed done. Judging to the fact we were 100 percent upgrading operating systems via piracy, the MS DOS 6.0 release with the disk “doubler” program DoubleSpace could have come into my life anywhere along the end of 1992 through its official release of March 1993.

DoubleSpace promised to safely double your hard drives capacity. So, I ran it, extended an extra 100 megabytes or so onto a Z: labeled drive. This worked but turned out to be a mess on a lot of levels. The main behind that 100 megabytes wasn’t going to satisfy file space needs as modem speeds increased, the other is that I think the “stacker” program eventually crashed that hard drive.

The Hard drive crash might have been what lent to one of the changes in BBS name. It was absolutely what helped me lobby for a larger Hard Drive in the upcoming birthday. All of this while in Junior high school. Sarlacc BBS ran along side 8^th and Ninth grade, transforming to TiT0rs I believe when Marty and I had some sort of disagreement that could only be solved by closing Sarlacc BBS.

That fight didn’t kill Sarlacc software though, just the BBS. I can remember in the tenth grade, more than a year later, when I was actually in a real computer programing class, recoding all the ideas from my game I wrote in basic into Turbo Pascal, and adding then starting to add ANSI, or ascii text graphics to the game. Okay Pascal wasn’t that much better but it was a step up for us. And, well yeah Marty and I were back at it. This time though the spiritual successors would be the BBS and will have their own sections. Imperial City and Deathrow, which I will say a lot more are just Sarlacc BBS, which better upgrades and new names, but still running Renegade and still doing the same thing.

It was a good year into Sarlacc Software phase 2 when I can remember Chris M., who was at another school during tenth grade, adding dialog and a weird intro screen to his Sam’s Mansion game. Marty had become obsessed, although I know he hated that term, with moving his projects into the C++ programming language, since his studies had shown that to be superior or at least that was the idea he was putting out there at the time. Borland made Turbo Pascal, but also a C compiler too that he kept trying to use to make the next great project on.

Interestingly enough my brother Bob, who was programming as a profession at this time in history recalls even Borland’s C++ as out of date. Meaning everything we were doing was just kind of amateur silliness. I do remember that the looming world of a new version of Windows 4.0 changing things and us needing to learn Visual Basic or Visual C, to make our software work in Windows, but Sarlacc would never get that far.

Sam’s Mansion would have a beginning and no end, MGRG would have character creation and some fight sequences but no story. All the ideas were worked on and enjoyed but nothing was to come over the years of Sarlacc Software beyond it being more of a club that only a few of us knew about and something we could brand on BBS images and other digital media with. Frankly that was good enough for me, and really for all of us.

By the end of 1994 the legacy of both Sarlacc Software and BBS were part of the past. My game would get a small rebirth as a piece of software in 1995, and if anything were to come of that I might have wanted to brand it as a Sarlacc Software game, but Sarlacc Software just became a fun idea whose time came and went. The BBS though would reopen under my next name, which I have mentioned, TiT0rS, or the Inbred Temple of Rough Sex. Or the opposite of a serious BBS for a seriously fake software company.

And so, it came to pass. That I found one of the early, I think, text based BASIC versions of My Game. This thing is rough and in Qbasic, no spell checking, offensive jokes and no way to manage what the user types in. But I found a version! Along with that neat bitmap I seem to have made for it. The Basic file is dated March 1993, and the image June of 1993, so fifteen year old ninth grade Ryan, I am afraid to keep diving but I can’t stop.