28k8-moonweb-org/README.md

🖥️ 28k8.moonweb.org - tHE tEMPLE bBS Retro Hub (v2)

A 90s BBS/demoscene retro hub, built with Astro + React Islands, deployed on Cloudflare Pages. No backend, no PHP, no database, no tracking. 🚫

✨ v2 highlights

• 🎨 The colored TEMPLE ANSI banner now actually renders on the main menu.
• 🔌 Disconnect works correctly (clears state, returns to the intro screen).
• 🔵 SkyLINE has a visible blue accent + a real generated header image.
• 🎭 10 full ASCII banners with color gradients across every page, an 8-item ANSI-art gallery, and real net-list content from the original screenshots.
• 📚 Lots more content: Tropic DREAMs (all 4 real releases), SkyLINE (+3), Kosmos Design (7, new), ESPRIT (4, new), MOD Files tracklist.

🗺️ Start here

1. 📋 PRD.md - requirements + v1.4 changelog
2. 📐 SPEC.md - technical spec, what changed and why
3. 📅 PLAN.md - phase-by-phase remaining work

🚀 Quick start

npm install
npm run dev       # http://localhost:4321
npm run build     # -> dist/
npm run preview   # serve the production build locally

☁️ Deployment

Cloudflare Pages, connected directly to this repo. Build command npm run build, output directory dist.

🔄 Pre-Build System

The pre-build system loads external data (JSON) before each build and writes it to src/data/. The JSON is committed, so the build does not depend on external servers.

./prebuild.sh          # all stages
./prebuild.sh mods     # MOD metadata only

Important: prebuild.sh is only run locally when external data changes. The result (JSON files in src/data/) is committed to the repo. In CI/CD (deploy.yml), npx astro build is called directly — this intentionally skips prebuild.sh since the JSON data is already in the repo.

Active stages:

Stage	Script	Output	Description
mods	tools/fetch_mods.py	src/data/mods.json	MOD metadata from moonweb.org

Add a new stage:

1. 🐍 Create tools/fetch_<name>.py (output: src/data/<name>.json)
2. 🔧 Add case block in prebuild.sh
3. 🏗️ npm run build automatically runs prebuild.sh

🎬 WelcomeBanner (Start Screen)

The "THE TEMPLE BBS" logo on the start screen is rendered as CP437 text with a typewriter animation. The text comes from a real CP437 file and is rendered with an IBM VGA webfont.

📁 Files

File	Purpose
source-assets/welcome.txt	Original file (CP437 encoded)
source-assets/welcome-utf8.txt	UTF-8 version, read by Astro
src/components/WelcomeBanner.astro	Component (rendering + animation)
public/fonts/Px437_IBM_VGA_8x16.woff2	CP437 webfont (6.6 KB)
public/fonts/Px437_IBM_VGA_8x16.ttf	Font as fallback
src/styles/global.css:2	@font-face definition

🤔 Why two text files?

Node.js does not support cp437 in TextDecoder. The original file is converted to UTF-8 via Python and the .txt file is saved alongside it. When welcome.txt is changed, the UTF-8 version must be regenerated:

python3 -c "
with open('source-assets/welcome.txt','rb') as f: d=f.read()
with open('source-assets/welcome-utf8.txt','w',encoding='utf-8') as f: f.write(d.decode('cp437'))
"

⏱️ Adjusting the animation

In src/components/WelcomeBanner.astro, lines 24-26:

const BASE = 8;    // base delay per character (ms)
const FAST = 4;    // delay for spaces (ms)
const HARD_PAUSES: [number, number][] = [[34, 400], [98, 350]];
//                                 [character position, pause in ms]

• BASE/FAST smaller = faster
• HARD_PAUSES = 2 deliberate pauses in the middle of a line. Position 34 ≈ middle of line 1, position 98 ≈ middle of line 2. Adjust values if line lengths change.

🔤 Font

Px437 IBM VGA 8x16 from int10h.org (Oldschool PC Font Pack v2.2, CC BY-SA 4.0). Contains 288 glyphs including all CP437 block characters (█, ▄, ▀, ▌, ▐, ░, ▒, ▓) and box-drawing characters.

The font is available via --font-ansi in global.css and is also used by the ANSI art banners (ansiArt.ts).

📜 License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

See LICENSE for the full text.