Forem-XE Pro BBS

Forem-XE Pro is a public domain BBS program, being a rewrite of Matt Singer's
original FoReM XE BBS. My first experience with it was late 1989, when 
version 4.5 had just been released. When I finally purchased a Basic XE 
cartridge and upgraded my 800XL to 256k, I was finally able to switch over 
from the old Oasis Jr. program to FXEP. What impressed me about it was the 
ability to run external programs and then return right where it left off, 
plus the message networking on this system was second to none, with 
information stored in the message data that allowed complete threading of 
messages and replies across different systems. There were also several 
excellent online games written for it, incuding Darel Schartman's 'Horror 
Castle', probably the best 'haunted house' game ever written for an Atari 
8-bit BBS.

The core of the BBS was the Automatic Modem Processor (AMP). This machine 
language core handled the sysop display screen, X/Ymodem block transfers, 
word-wraps and page-breaks on text files and messages, and was the main 
"traffic cop" for all I/O, automatically opening and closing the modem 
channel as needed, as well as watchdogging the carrier.

By version 4.8, the program had outgrown even the extended memory capability 
of Basic XE, and the file transfer section was spun off into its own module. 
Version 5.0 saw AMP rewritten, tightening some of the code, especially the 
modem output. The last released version, 5.4, saw TWO versions of AMP, one 
for the SIO modem interfaces, the other for the PBI interfaces. The PBI 
version especially was optimized for 19.2k port speed. In the main program, 
some Basic routines were replaced with machine code, which speeded some 
functions up considerably.