A test version of the Tornado 2 Front End is running again on www.lyzard.net port 2000 - it's probably full of bugs at the moment, so please be patient, and report any problems, particularly with the telnet session - make sure you let me know what operating system and terminal program you are using if something isn't working as expected. You may also find a version of Prodigy running at times!
More updates to the Players section - I've changed the way the email addresses are obscured (it looks fairly normal, but the information is in seperate table cells).
IOWA-MUG now has a Gallery for IOWA related picture links. Anyone who has old pictures on-line, please let me know - if you have any photos but nowhere to host them, then I can scan and put them up.
Information about StarLite added. I hope to add some code snippets etc. when I have time for those interested in what happened behind the scenes. Might even show you the code to a puzzle or two... Dragon picture (above) drawn, scanned and placed. It's not brilliant, but it'll do. Lee's Tornado logo added to the Tornado pages (thanks!).
Fairly major site overhaul - a frames option has been re-introduced for those of you who like such things. Colours have been changed on a whim... maybe I'll change them again soon, maybe not...
Holding pages have been added for Quest and Empyrion, so hopefully someone will write the entries for them soon.
Updates to the Players section - if you want to be listed, please send me an e-mail with the details you want shown.
Updates to the Tornado section.
Following a conversation in one of the MUD newsgroups, there may be some interest in Tornado/Tornado II as a protocol independent interface - by this I mean as a means for providing access to a game from different client types (telnet, WAP, other systems). If I can sufficiently separate the game<->FE protocol from the content this could be interesting. It would probably require games to conform to some standard of mark-up tags though.
Tornado II is still progressing quite nicely. I have implemented more of the Telnet protocol, and managed to find a terminal type that Microsoft Telnet (at least the Windows 2000 version) will work with. Unfortunately MS TN insists on identifying it's terminal type as ANSI, but will ncurses seems to only work if it is set to PCANSI!
My current mission is to differentiate between MS Telnet requesting an ANSI terminal (and supply it with a PCANSI one instead) and a real Telnet program requesting ANSI - unfortunately MS TN doesn't seem to be able to provide the environment, so I can't check that either.
Updates to the Tornado section of the site, including some information on Tornado II (T2).
It's been a long while, but things are being updated again. I have started work on Tornado 2, which will be a replacement for my semi-functioning Tornado front end. T2 will include ANSI colour support, and possibly various other improvements that are being worked upon.
I have re-registered the iowa-mug.net domain, and if anyone wants an @iowa-mug.net e-mail address let me know. Try to keep the traffic low as I don't have unlimited bandwidth!
The list is up to approximately 30 members, although many of them seem to be sleepers. If you've subscribed but not posted recently, how about saying "Hi" to let us know you still exist.
I'm planning a complete re-design for this site (which is why it's looking so bland at the moment). Any suggestions, as usual, are welcome.
The list continues to grow. We're up to 21 subscribers now, with most of the regular crew from 1990-1992 subscribed.
The results for the 16Kb MUD competition are in. I came roughly half way up the list - not too bad (I had to rush finishing my entry). Not a winner, but it was fun anyway.
Just for a laugh I am entering the 16Kb MUD competition. This is basically a competition to see who can write the best MUD in 16kb or less of source code (excluding comments, indentation etc.). So far I'm at about 12kb with a very simple game.
Update - I'm very nearly finished (about 15kb at the moment, so it's time to optimise and finish the final game database.
Protege was to be the successor to Prodigy, but never saw the light of day due to IOWA being closed before any real advance was made. Now the project is beginning again, along with a re-write of the StarLite language. More information on StarLite 5 and Protege, here.
A new area has been created for information on the re-write of Tornado and StarLite to run using sockets under Linux.
I have managed to unearth an old backup of the Prodigy code and data (after searching through approximately 500 old disks!). The good news is I have a copy running in local-only mode, and it appears to be fully functional.
I have registered the domains iowa-mug.co.uk and iowa-mug.net and they now point to this page. At some stage in the future I hope to have a distinct server serving one or both of these domains.