avatar_chat_universal
Plug it in to Synchronet, Mystic, ENiGMA½ or whatever. Drop file in, native binary out. Your users land in the same channels as everyone running the existing JS avatar_chat door on Synchronet, because
the wire protocol is the same and it talks to the same chat server. Nothing forks.

Got a really vague tty raw error with EleBBS, which runs things similar to Mystic. Using the Win32 version. Happens when running from the command line with -user UserName as well.

--
Shurato, Sysop Shurato's Heavenly Sphere (ssh, telnet, pop3, ftp,nntp,
,wss, ssh utf-8) (22,23,110,21,119,999,2222) shsbbs.net FREQ Me!


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
---
* Origin: Shurato's Heavenly Sphere telnet://shsbbs.net (21:2/148)

avatar_chat_universal
Plug it in to Synchronet, Mystic, ENiGMA½ or whatever. Drop file in, native binary out. Your users land in the same channels as everyone running the existing JS avatar_chat door on Synchronet, because
the wire protocol is the same and it talks to the same chat server. Nothing forks.

Is the Win32 version working for anyone?

--
Shurato, Sysop Shurato's Heavenly Sphere (ssh, telnet, pop3, ftp,nntp,
,wss, ssh utf-8) (22,23,110,21,119,999,2222) shsbbs.net FREQ Me!


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
---
* Origin: Shurato's Heavenly Sphere telnet://shsbbs.net (21:2/148)

* In a message originally to Shurato, Hm Derdoc said:

Thanks Shurato - I always appreciate how quick you let me know when something's off! I did run via CLI and notice some issues which
should now be fixed, and most likely explain what you saw too on
your BBS. I don't have a Windows box to test with but I'm hoping
the new 0.1.2 release solves the issue if you'd be so kind enough
to try again :)

No problem and will do!

--
Shurato, Sysop Shurato's Heavenly Sphere (ssh, telnet, pop3, ftp,nntp,
,wss, ssh utf-8) (22,23,110,21,119,999,2222) shsbbs.net FREQ Me!


---
* Origin: Shurato's Heavenly Sphere telnet://shsbbs.net (21:2/148)

Thanks Shurato - I always appreciate how quick you let me know when something's off! I did run via CLI and notice some issues which
should now be fixed, and most likely explain what you saw too on your
BBS. I don't have a Windows box to test with but I'm hoping the new
0.1.2 release solves the issue if you'd be so kind enough to try
again :)

Same problem:
ele\avatarc>avatar_chat_universal -user Shurato
avatar_chat_universal: standalone: make tty raw: The parameter is incorrect.

--
Shurato, Sysop Shurato's Heavenly Sphere (ssh, telnet, pop3, ftp,nntp,
,wss, ssh utf-8) (22,23,110,21,119,999,2222) shsbbs.net FREQ Me!


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
---
* Origin: Shurato's Heavenly Sphere telnet://shsbbs.net (21:2/148)

Ok, I was able to feed that to Claude for some tips and hopefully we are now barking up the right tree, there should be a version 0.1.3
available now which has these changes, summary below:

Socket mode in windows is not yet implemented. Use STDIO. I don't have that option.

--
Shurato, Sysop Shurato's Heavenly Sphere (ssh, telnet, pop3, ftp,nntp,
,wss, ssh utf-8) (22,23,110,21,119,999,2222) shsbbs.net FREQ Me!


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
---
* Origin: Shurato's Heavenly Sphere telnet://shsbbs.net (21:2/148)

avatar_chat_universal
Plug it in to Synchronet, Mystic, ENiGMA½ or whatever. Drop file in, native binary out. Your users land in the same channels as everyone running the existing JS avatar_chat door on Synchronet, because the wire protocol is the same and it talks to the same chat server. Nothing forks.

Here's what that gets you on screen, in roughly the order I like them.

A 10×6 CP437 avatar in a gutter next to every message a user sends. They pick from bundled sets — corporate logos, sci-fi heads, eighties stuff, futureland originals — or they upload their own .bin over honest-to-god Zmodem, or they sketch one out in the door's pixel editor. Their avatar travels with their messages everywhere. You get to know people by their faces.

Messages in colored bubbles, side-aligned by speaker. Above each one: their name, a relative timestamp that ages in place ("just now", "5m ago", "yesterday 14:30"), then their BBS hostname in magenta. You can tell at a glance who's local and who dialed in from where without thinking about it.

When everybody goes quiet, the transcript area gives way. Fifteen procedural animations — starfield, plasma, aurora, matrix rain, fireworks, Life, lightning, fire-and-smoke — cycle through. Or, if a sysop drops a folder of SAUCE-tagged .ans files in (point it at the sixteencolors archive and you've got decades of scene art on tap), the door interleaves a single piece between each procedural anim. Scrolls up from the bottom, off the top, picks another. Wide pieces — 132 or 160 column — clip the right edge cleanly without distorting alignment.

Messages keep arriving the whole time. They don't kill the screensaver. They slide along as a small ticker on the bottom row for six seconds and then fade, so you see activity without losing the background.

For sysops: themes live in themes/<name>.ini, where the color palette and the idle-animation profile both sit. Ship a "cyberpunk" theme that pins the rotation to matrix_rain + lightning + plasma; ship a "forest" theme that runs aurora + fireflies + ocean ripples. Whatever feels right.

Splash screen on entry. Drop a SAUCE-tagged .ans in and that's what users see while the chat connects. Easy to turn off.

There's a self-hostable chat server in the box. Same wire protocol as futureland.today. If you want a private deployment, or you just don't want to depend on someone else's uptime, run the bundled avatar_chat_server next to the door and point at it. JS-door users join too — same protocol.

Standalone CLI mode for when you don't have a BBS handy: ./avatar_chat_universal -user yourname puts your terminal into raw mode and connects you straight to the chat.

Pre-built binaries for linux/amd64, linux/arm64, linux/386, windows/amd64, windows/386, darwin/amd64, darwin/arm64. MIT.

Pre-1.0, and the in-door pixel editor is labeled BETA in the UI because Moebius or Pablo Draw plus uploading the .bin is honestly a nicer experience for real avatar work. Everything else is solid daily-driver material.

Repo: https://github.com/hmderdoc/avatar_chat_universal

Releases: https://github.com/hmderdoc/avatar_chat_universal/releases

If you run it on something other than Synchronet, I'd love to hear how it goes.
\ >== HM Derdoc ==< /
/ @futureland.today \
--- SBBSecho 3.37-Linux
* Origin: telnet://futureland.today https://blockbra.in (21:2/139)

Looks like that was left as a stub for some reason <facepalm>... It's implemented now in v0.1.4 available in releases. Thanks for your patience, as always.

Closer, it starts and tries to let me pick an avatar, then abends
immediately. I didn't see any errors.

--
Shurato, Sysop Shurato's Heavenly Sphere (ssh, telnet, pop3, ftp,nntp,
,wss, ssh utf-8) (22,23,110,21,119,999,2222) shsbbs.net FREQ Me!


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
---
* Origin: Shurato's Heavenly Sphere telnet://shsbbs.net (21:2/148)

Looks like that was left as a stub for some reason <facepalm>... It's implemented now in v0.1.4 available in releases. Thanks for your patience, as always.

Yay! Ater 0.1.5 it appears to be ready for prime time!

--
Shurato, Sysop Shurato's Heavenly Sphere (ssh, telnet, pop3, ftp,nntp,
,wss, ssh utf-8) (22,23,110,21,119,999,2222) shsbbs.net FREQ Me!


*** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
---
* Origin: Shurato's Heavenly Sphere telnet://shsbbs.net (21:2/148)

Thanks Shurato - I always appreciate how quick you let me know when something's off! I did run via CLI and notice some issues which should now be fixed, and most likely explain what you saw too on your BBS. I don't have a Windows box to test with but I'm hoping the new 0.1.2 release solves the issue if you'd be so kind enough to try again :)

Cheers!

\ >== HM Derdoc ==< /
/ @futureland.today \
--- SBBSecho 3.37-Linux
* Origin: telnet://futureland.today https://blockbra.in (21:2/139)

Ok, I was able to feed that to Claude for some tips and hopefully we are now barking up the right tree, there should be a version 0.1.3 available now which has these changes, summary below:

golang.org/x/term's MakeRaw issues one SetConsoleMode call that combines clearing cooked-mode flags and setting ENABLE_VIRTUAL_TERMINAL_INPUT. Legacy ConHost (older Win10, Server 2016, VT-disabled hosts) rejects the combined call → ERROR_INVALID_PARAMETER → the "make tty raw: The parameter is incorrect" he's seeing.

New cmd/avatar_chat_universal/tty_windows.go does it in two steps:

1. Mandatory: clear ENABLE_LINE_INPUT | ENABLE_ECHO_INPUT | ENABLE_PROCESSED_INPUT — the part that always works.
2.Best-effort: VT input + VT output processing on follow-up calls; failure ignored.
---------------

I hope that works! It's a fun little program

\ >== HM Derdoc ==< /
/ @futureland.today \
--- SBBSecho 3.37-Linux
* Origin: telnet://futureland.today https://blockbra.in (21:2/139)

Looks like that was left as a stub for some reason <facepalm>... It's implemented now in v0.1.4 available in releases. Thanks for your patience, as always.

\ >== HM Derdoc ==< /
/ @futureland.today \
--- SBBSecho 3.37-Linux
* Origin: telnet://futureland.today https://blockbra.in (21:2/139)

Trying to run this in Windows 10 32 bit but just get a bunch of characters that scroll the screen even when I run stand alone. On win10 64bit computer the 32bit version runs fine as stand alone but not on win10 32 computer.

|02-=|10Cozmo|02=-

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Windows/32)
* Origin: Lunatics Unleashed BBS (21:3/135)

Hey Cozmo,

Thanks for the report. Tagged v0.1.7 with a fix that should handle
your case.

What changed: the door now wraps stdout with go-colorable on Windows.
It auto-detects whether the console can render ANSI escapes natively
and translates them to Win32 console API calls when it can't. No-op
on non-console handles (door-mode pipes / sockets), so it's safe
across every Windows configuration we ship for.

Best guess at what was happening, based on the symptoms you described:
your console likely wasn't getting VT output processing enabled at
startup, so our ANSI escapes were printing as literal "^[[31m"
characters scrolling down the screen. That would also explain why the
same windows_386 binary worked on Win10 64-bit (modern ConHost more
likely to have VT auto-enabled). I haven't confirmed that on your
specific machine -- v0.1.7 should fix it regardless of which exact
Win10 console quirk caused it, but if it still misbehaves, the new
stderr warning will tell us what's actually happening.

Grab v0.1.7:

https://github.com/hmderdoc/avatar_chat_universal/releases/tag/v0.1.7

If it still misbehaves, run it once and send me whatever shows up on
stderr -- there's a new diagnostic line that fires when VT enable
fails, which will narrow it down.

Cheers,
Hm

\ >== HM Derdoc ==< /
/ @futureland.today \
--- SBBSecho 3.37-Linux
* Origin: telnet://futureland.today https://blockbra.in (21:2/139)

If it still misbehaves, run it once and send me whatever shows up on stderr -- there's a new diagnostic line that fires when VT enable
fails, which will narrow it down.

It works great as stand a lone but i can't get it to show in a term program only local. Tried many different setting with no luck.

|02-=|10Cozmo|02=-

... A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A48 (Windows/32)
* Origin: Lunatics Unleashed BBS (21:3/135)