Mark "The Count of Time" Stevens was running a BBS called "The Clock Works" about 8 years ago, and I was his co-sysop. One day Mark was complaining that 1000 sectors (Version 1.00 of TW2002 had just been released) was just not enough.
He said to me - you are a programmer, change TW2002 so we can run more sectors.
I spent the next month trying to explain to him why it was impossible. It's not that Mark is stupid (he isn't) but that he just didn't understand programming....
The all of a sudden it hit me - I couldn't make TW2002 V1 handle more than a 1000 sectors, but I could cheat. I could run 2 or more sets of data files, and link them. This sounds easy - to a non-programmer. Believe me, it wasn't. In fact it was nightmare. It took 3 months of part time programming (I sell forklift repair parts for a living), many calls to friends (who are better programmers than I), several calls to Microsoft's support service, and a lot of head scratching to make the sucker work - barely.
None of the people I talked to - one of whom has a university degree in computer science - really understood what I was trying to do, and none of them had a clue on how to do it. I was told it was impossible more times than I could count.
But I knew it was possible, I already had a "working" prototype. Um, mostly working. Most of the time. Kind off...
Finally I had something that I thought would hold together enough to try out with real players. So I asked Mark how big he wanted it. He said "How big can you make it?" I told him that it would work with 20,000 sectors (20 games), and of course that was what he wanted.
So we banged up 20 games, made the settings identical, and installed, it. Then the fun began. I was actually up to V0.30 at that point, and I made some REALLY interesting discoveries once we had 40 players into it and getting very lost. Two weeks later we were up to V0.41, and other sysops were asking for copies, so I decided to take it shareware and see what happened. This may have been the biggest mistake I've ever made - I'd designed it for me, and not bothered writing an install program.
Big surprise - within a month I'd recieved a cheque, and within 3 months I'd recieved 3 more. Not bad I thought - and a nice ego boost. At this time Mark was running WWIV BBS software (go to www.wwiv.com and grab yourself a copy if you want to run a DOS BBS) and we were part of WWIVNet, and I'd started a message group called the "TW2002 Sysop Sub" and I mentioned the Expander there. All of a sudden we started getting calls from all over the US and Canada, and it was our most popular download. Meanwhile I was still squashing bugs, and dealing with undocumented features that kept poping up... Only now I was getting emails from all over, and panicked phone calls from people who couldn't make the thing run. And lots of them were running BBS software that I'd never heard about, and didn't have a clue how it worked!
So now I was too busy to write an install program. Somehow I staggered through the next two years, and remained marginally sane. Still it was fun, and the expander remained a viable way of making TW2002 more exciting for the players untill V2 of TW2002 came out.
I want to thank all those people who helped me, and they were legion. People made Ansi's for me, others wrote files on how to connect the Expander to BBS packages I knew nothing about, others worked with other sysops to help the get things going. And many sysops called me long distance at their expense to explain things that had happened. Without their help I would have got a lot less done. It was appreciated folks.
I owe a special thanks to The Count of Time for talking me into it (I'll get you yet Mark), Lord Loki (for introducing me to WWIVnet), Lord Graham (for explaining how turbo pascal REAL numbers were stored), The Romulan Prince (for writing code that would handle TP REAL numbers that ran so fast it made my head spin), and my wife Fuzzy Elf (for putting up with a husband who for large amounts of time was so engrossed in wthe latest bug he couldn't string a coherent sentence together).
I've been asked a lot of questions - here are the most common ones, with answers:
Question: Is there an expander for TW2002 V2 doors?
Answer: Yes, but it was never released. TW2002 V2 doors never made it out of beta, and beta's are notorious for changes.
Question: Is there an expander for TW2002 for MBBS (High Velocity Software version)?
Answer: No, and I'm not planning on
doing one. I looked at the idea, and while I think it could be
done, Galacticom's price for their programming library is
prohibitive. However if someone was to give me a copy
Question: Is there an expander for TW2002 V3 doors?
Answer: It's in development. Currently I am working on the "theory" of operation, and writing up my flow charts. However it won't be out till sometime in 2000, as I have several other projects that have to be finished first. It won't be released untill finished - unlike the first one.
Question: What else are you working on?
Answer: More than I have time for. TWLava for V3.09 is out, and it will work with both the Game Server and door version of TW2002 V3.00+. TW Nebulae has now been released, and it works with both as well. I have several ideas, and am accepting suggestions. Check these pages every so often for updates.
Question: Are you really crazy?
Answer: It would probably help if I was, unfortuneately I'm not! Yet.
Question: Do you still run a board?
Answer: Not at present. I'm looking at getting either a telnet board running, or setting up Game Server, suggestions would be welcome.
Here are copies of the latest version of the Expander. Remember that it only works with TW2002 V1 through V1.03D