Been busy lately.... Just finished up writing a client / server package in Pascal / javascipt. It's going into beta now.
It's free open source. Available at https://github.com/codewar65/VTX_ClientServer
Back in the day before the internet, we all used to dial into the local BBS to read and send mail, download iD and Apogee software, play door games, or chat with friends.
I ran such a system myself from 1992-1996. A four node FidoNet board running T.A.G. 2.6 BBS on various systems ranging from a 286 running DesqView to a 486DX with OS/2 Warp.
There are still out there, and more and more they are making their way onto the internet via telnet connections. My VTX client runs in a browser and connects to these telnetted BBS's via a websocket connection to a proxy server. I have written and tested support for ANSI BBS, PETSCII (Commodore VIC20, C64, and C128), as well as ATASCII (Atari 8 bit). I've extended the ANSI control sequences for my terminal to allow for SVG sprite graphics and MP3 audio (streaming or file) along with some VT100 codes and special ones to alter the line size for double height characters, ability to emulate BBC CeeFax styl;e Teletext (mosiac block characters and font), new text attributes like drop shadowing, two blinking text modes, and so on..
The client runs in as a normal webpage either stand alone through an existing webserver and websocket proxy, or you can use the webserver / websocket proxy I have written to go with it. Aside from connecting to a telnet service, my server will allow the system operator (SysOp) to configure the node software to be a standard console type application and pipe StdIn / StdOut through the websocket connection.
I've developed utilities to go along with it that will convert ROM dumps of character definitions from old computers, X11 bdf font defs, and what not into vectorized TTF / WOFF webfonts, converting SVG to a new type of hex encoding (hex characters 0x30-0x3F) that can be passed in standard ANSI CSI escape sequences, and converting old ANSI text graphic files from about 40 different codepages to UTF8 character encoding.
A great resource for finding BBS's out there today is http://telnetbbsguide.com. Lots of free boards to visit.
Anyway, it's been fun writing and seeing the grand reactions from the group of rusty old SysOps I hang out with these days on the net.
Peace,
codewar65 aka Dan