Finally my Mac can visit BBSes without question marks everywhere

It's long been a dream of mine, and an occasional quest, to be able to visit BBSes like in the good old days, the early 90s, when games like Tradewars 2002 and Legend of the Red Dragon, aka LORD, were the best thing going "online." Heck, online actually meant on-a-phone-line then.

These days almost every BBS still around is accessible through telnet. The problem with using these BBSes with a Mac is the view, especially if you use the Mac Terminal application. The colored DOS-based text that made all of the once-fancy graphics possible on BBSes just doesn't display properly on a Mac, not without a good amount of research and downloads and settings adjustments.

There is one program out there that seems to be a silver bullet for this problem though, a program so old it looks like it is DOS-based, even though it works great on the OS X platform. It's called SyncTERM, available at http://syncterm.bbsdev.net/. SyncTERM takes some getting used to, as its interface is simple, with just enough menus and settings to get the job done. What it does do superbly is display extended ASCII text and ANSI special effects, all of the fancy characters that are in the VT-100 font family you probably took for granted when your system ran on DOS, Windows 3.1 or Windows 95.

If you really enjoyed those old BBSes and miss some of the door games that made them a part of your life, but haven't found a way to display all of that colored text properly on your modern Mac, give SyncTERM a shot. What makes it even cooler is the program is free. No charge. It's available on plenty of operating systems too, not just Mac OS X.