About ATO Doors Demo Site

ATO Doors is the demo board for the ATO Doors software: a web launcher for 16-bit DOS door games that runs on ordinary shared PHP hosting. The games here are the originals, byte for byte, written between 1989 and 1999 for bulletin board systems. Each one starts in a small DOS machine inside your browser, talks to the server the way it once talked to a BBS, and shares its world with every other player on this site.

What to expect. Each door gives you a daily allowance of turns or minutes, the way doors always did. Come back tomorrow and the world has moved: other players fought, traded, married, died. Most doors here let several players in at once, and some of them (Usurper, The Pit, Drakeville, LORD II, Arrowbridge II) show you the others live.

The software. ATO Doors is free software under the MIT license, from the people who made ATDT BBS and ATA BBS. The DOS machine is v86 running FreeDOS; the games remain the work of their authors, credited on every door's page. If you run a BBS, a club or a classroom and want doors of your own, the package installs in a few minutes on any PHP host.

This is a demo. Worlds may be reset now and then, and a door may be closed for maintenance. If something looks wrong, the sysop reads the mailbox named at the bottom of every letter this site sends.

The house rules

Play fair: no scripts, no macros, no second accounts. Leave a door through its own quit so your character is saved. Be civil in the games that have chat; the sysop can see the logs. Accounts that sit unused for a year may be removed. That is all.

How it works

Every door here is the real thing: a DOS program from the bulletin board days, running unchanged. When you press Play, your browser starts a small DOS machine of its own, fetches the game, and connects it to a terminal on your screen. Nothing is installed on your computer, and nothing runs on the server but the files and the scores everyone shares.

You need a current browser, a keyboard, and a little patience the first time: a big door can take half a minute to arrive. After that it starts in seconds. Leave through the game's own quit so it saves; Ctrl+] three times, or the Hang up button, drops the line the old-fashioned way.

Several players can be in a door at once where the door was built for it; the door's own page says how many. Each door gives you so many minutes a day, as the sysop set it.