C-Net DS2, Looking for D64's

[drarkanex]

I've spoke with Jim Selleck himself and he says he's not sure if any D64's exist.  He used Dongle protection for DS2 software which is probably the reason I can't find it anywhere.  If anyone has a copy of DS2 any version please send it to me. 

Jim Selleck does have in his possession the original source code for all versions of DS2 he's worked on, but they are locked up on a SCSI hard drive formatted on an Amiga.  He said if he could get those hard drives spun back up and those files off of there, he would release DS-2 without the copy protection...  let me know what's up so I can pass the word along...  I would hate for this legendary piece of work go to the trash... 

[Andrew Armstrong]

Any more info? I'm pretty confused on what this is about, haha.

[RedWolf]

Any more info? I'm pretty confused on what this is about, haha.

Me too.  At first I thought it was some weird kind of spam, but then I realized that he actually is talking about Commodore 64 Software.

Please fill us in with more details, drarkanex.  And welcome to the forum, by the way.

[BEller]

Looks like he gave up the quest.  I was curious enough to Google Jim Selleck.  He authored the CNet BBS software, the last version of which was labled "DS2."   As suggested, the d64 refers to the file format used to compress a whole Commodore 64 disk. 

Google is your friend!

Bob

[Jim Selleck]

Heh.  Ya know, it tickles when somebody Googles you.

In case anybody is morbidly interested, there has been progress made on this informal Commodore 64 project.  First, some history.  Yes, I wrote the last version of C-Net BBS for Commodore 64 which was released in 1990.  It was officially titled C-Net DS2, short for Developer's System 2, based on the idea that users with some BASIC skills could create their own add-ons and make them available to users.

Astonishingly (to me) some 20 odd years later (accent on 'odd') there are still people out there interested in running C=64 BBS software.  Why?  I cannot imagine.  Those nostalgic folks who had a place in their hearts for C-Net run version v10.0 (the last version entirely written by original author Ken Pletzer) and some masochists run my first stab at taking it over, which was called "v11.6".  I have heard rumors that a few disks of v11.1 are still out there, but I really HOPE NOT, because that was my VERY first attempt and it was recalled as fast as possible and replaced (for free) about 6 months later with the fixed and reworked v11.6.  I was young and naive and did not know what I was doing and what kind of testing was required, so 11.1 ONLY ran on the exact hardware I had in my lab.  It only worked with ONE of the 3 versions of the ROMs, and only ONE of the 3 different Buscard versions, etc.  11.6 was the result of vastly expanding my testing hardware, plus a lot of all-nighters and pizza and Pop-Tarts and apple juice.

DS2 was a quantum leap above 10 and 11.6, including a lot of really cool ideas for the time, however it is impossible to use DS-2 today because it is dongled, and when I say dongled I mean that I went to the most extreme military grade measures imaginable to make sure that you absolutely could NOT run it without the dongle, and I even sabotaged my own ML so that if you DID figure out out to disable the dongle routines, the remaining system would be unreliable and crashy.

In hindsight, I really regret all that.

So, what I am doing now is gathering together my source code (yes, somebody WAS able to rescue it off my moldy old SCSI drives) with the intention of trying to:

1.  De-dongle DS2
2.  Make it run on the VICE emulator
3.  Put in some Y2K fixes (how embarrassing is THAT?)
4.  Release the whole bloody thing as Open Source
5.  (maybe, no promises) consider releasing DS3 which was almost complete in 1993, never finished.

Now, whether I have TIME to do all that, I dunno.  We'll see.  Thanks for reading.

Jim Selleck
Brighton, Michigan
6-12-2010

[wiskow]

Apple juice?  You really were young!