MyMUD

Due to an email about some software I wrote in the early ’90s, I was also reminded of a MUD version I wrote in Turbo Pascal¹. Of course, I was ridiculed when I tried to share this in the community at the time. MUDs were written in C on Unix machines!² Not under DOS in Pascal, for heaven’s sake?!

Of course, those people only knew about “standard” Pascal, whereas Turbo Pascal could basically do what Borland C++ could³. If I remember correctly, the unit files were even compatible (or something like that—it has been some time)⁴.

But the biggest mistake was that they didn’t think outside the box. While I freely admit that MyMUD wouldn’t be able to deal with hundreds of people, two or three users should have been perfectly possible⁵.

So what was MyMUD? It was a TinyMUD clone written in Turbo Pascal, designed to be used on a shared data file using record locking to avoid collisions⁶.

At the time I wrote the program, I was professionally running a BBS⁷ with six telephone lines and a UUCP interface to Internet newsgroups as they existed back then⁸. All of this was done with five PCs, a LANtastic network⁹, DESQview¹⁰ for multitasking, and QEMM¹¹ for memory management.

This was also the environment in which I ran MyMUD: computers connected through LANtastic, with a shared folder containing the database and support files. And yes—it worked.

I did share the code at the time, and a few people played with it, but it never became popular. Other systems were better and more mature. Still, as a proof of concept, it worked quite nicely.

Since I still have the code (and the decompiled version), I recently tried running it in two DOSBox instances¹²—and lo and behold, it still worked. And I could still read the code, as it was very modular¹³.

So here’s to the days of yore, and to my exploration of MUDs on machines people could actually have at home.

Footnotes

1. Turbo Pascal – A popular Pascal compiler and IDE from Borland in the 1980s–90s, known for fast compilation and advanced features for its time. Unlike “standard” Pascal, it supported DOS-specific memory tricks and modular programming through units. ↩
2. Most MUDs of the era, including DikuMUD, TinyMUD, and LPmud variants, were written in C and ran on Unix systems. DOS-based MUDs were extremely rare. ↩
3. Turbo Pascal had many features comparable to Borland C++, including modular units, separate compilation, and direct hardware access, making it surprisingly powerful for DOS. ↩
4. “Unit files” in Turbo Pascal were essentially modules that could be compiled separately and reused—some compatibility with Borland C++ headers existed, but it was limited. ↩
5. The scalability limit was due to DOS and Turbo Pascal’s memory model (conventional 640 KB, EMS/XMS extensions). Two or three simultaneous users could be handled through careful file locking; hundreds would have been impossible. ↩
6. TinyMUD clone – MyMUD replicated the core ideas of TinyMUD: a simple text-based world, flexible object-oriented design, and multiple users interacting via a shared database. Record locking was used to prevent corruption when multiple clients wrote to the same data simultaneously. ↩
7. BBS (Bulletin Board System) – Early pre-Internet online communities where users connected via modems to exchange messages, files, or games. ↩
8. UUCP – Unix-to-Unix Copy Protocol, used for sending emails and Usenet newsgroup posts across the early Internet infrastructure. ↩
9. LANtastic – A peer-to-peer LAN networking software popular in the late ’80s and early ’90s, allowing DOS PCs to share files and printers. ↩
10. DESQview – A multitasking environment for DOS that allowed running multiple DOS programs simultaneously on a single machine. ↩
11. QEMM – A memory manager that helped DOS applications access extended memory beyond the 640 KB conventional limit. ↩
12. DOSBox – Modern DOS emulator, useful for running legacy software on contemporary PCs. ↩
13. Modular coding in Turbo Pascal made the program readable decades later, demonstrating good programming practice even in small hobby projects. ↩