New Releases – January 2026

Ooooooh, a fresh batch of Demonic Productions releases! Well, sort of fresh. While this is our first release push of 2026, we’ve developed a bit of a pattern in that usually announcing a batch of new releases inspires us to work on finishing up others, so many of these were actually completed not long after the last batch in 2025. Funny how that works. Anyway, let’s get to it!

esc's voting door for daydream/linux!

First up, esc brings us a new voting door for Daydream/Linux. This one is fully featured, all original, and of course, includes its c source code. It also features some awesome old school ASCII goodness by griskokare of Legacy Crew, donated by Hawk Hubbard prior to his passing. RIP Hawk!

Continuing his noble and seemingly endless quest to fix and otherwise update classic Daydream mods/doors to get them to work to compile and often just plain work on modern systems, he’s got four more releases under his belt. First up is cheesewarn v0.3. A rewrite of a mod by jupiter8 of STF that displays a warning about users who haven’t been logging in frequently enough. Next is Menace Status Door v1.0. Originally by moondog and fenriz of menace, this is a rewrite of a nice little status screen mod. saturnvalidate v1.0 is another update of a jupiter8 joint. This mod shows a list of all new users, with the intent of letting your system’s other users vouch for them – perfect for your login sequence. Finally, we have WHAT v0.93, originally by bObO of mYSTiC. This slick little door shows what (heh) files are currently being being transferred. Perfect for more file focused Daydream boards.

esc's WHAT file transfer status for daydream/linux!

Finally, something a little bigger and not solely for Daydream, esc brings us his BBS Firewall (bbsfw). Written totally in Node.js, bbsfw is intended to provide a front-end for telnet BBSes, supporting many of the advanced features found in newer BBS software that older ones and other methods of hosting older software wouldn’t normally have, such as total connection limits and time based/connection rate limits, temporary blocking, connection timeouts, IP address whitelisting and blacklisting, filtering by country, detailed logging, and even an SSH proxy. esc has been working on this for a while now, but v1.20 marks its first Demonic release. While we’ll continue to put out any larger releases/updates, you can also check out his GitHub repo.

Next up, we have Lights Out v1.1 by xqtr. This is an enhanced version of the door game we released back in September. This one includes a couple of major bug fixes which would have made the door non-functional in a lot of situations, an unfortunate side effect of the fact that this door has been built using xqtr’s new XDoor v4.00 door kit, which is essentially our old warhorse of a Pascal door kit, XDoor 3.01, with a bunch of new units filled with even more awesome functions for you to use in your doors. While XDoor4 itself will be coming soon, this release will hopefully not only make Light’s Out work as intended, but also includes a Win32/door32.sys binary in additional to the DOS one and greatly expanded setup docs. Special thanks to Shurato and Exodus on Zer0net for reporting these issues and helping test the fixes!

opicron's lastcallers 1.0 for mystic bbs

Last but certainly not least, Opicron makes his Demonic debut with LastCallers v1.0 for Mystic BBS. Inspired my xqtr’s AmiCaller Ami/x style MPL mod from 2017, LastCallers is a full MPY last callers replacement featuring additional stats, a scrollable caller list, and is fully customizable. It also saves its data in JSON, intended for longer term and more versatile storage of last caller data. Oh, and it supports both traditional 80×25 as well as 132×37 terminals – widescreen support, baby! For Mystic 1.12 A46+ with Python 2.7.

Before anyone asks, despite having several new goodies close to being ready for release, I’m personally not included in this batch as I hadn’t had much free time to work on any modding or development for the last half of 2025. That situation should be over, however, so I’ll be diving back into getting those things completed very soon.

GitHub Releases and You

Happy New Year! Good god, where has the last year gone?! I’ll be putting together some more exciting stuff very soon, but for now, let’s get super serious.

The traditional mindset of having larger, infrequent software “releases” has been slowly replaced by a more continuous integration minded approach favored by the now ubiquitous GitHub and similar platforms. While more and more hobbyist developers take the hands off stance of just treating their code as “live” these days, from what I’ve seen, most of us are still maintaining version/build numbers and documenting changes even if not packaging our releases. Why not have both? GitHub has a feature called “Releases” that allows for just that.

Looking through versions of Iniquity BBS

Releases are actually enabled by default, so unless you have it disabled you probably already see it, just sitting there empty, begging for some attention.

To get started, just go to “Releases” and click “Draft a new release” and…

  • Give the release a tag (I usually just use the version number, as recommended.) You can use whatever method of versioning you want – GitHub doesn’t care.
  • Pick the target – by default this will be your current master branch, but you can also target other branches and/or specific commits too.
  • You can then give your release a title (again, I keep it simple with the project name and version number) and your release notes, release announcement, etc. You can keep this brief or go as in-depth as you want here.
  • Finally, and this is one of the features that makes this really awesome for those of us in the BBS scene and other, similar hobbyist niches, is the ability to attach files to the release. While an archive of the source code for target commit will be included, you can also attach pre-compiled binaries, or better yet, manually package your release the old fashioned way and attach it here.

The end result is that you have a snapshot of the source code of a specific version, the associated binaries and/or release archive of that version, along with whatever release notes and other details you want to include, all in one highly visible place. It’s also all automagically associated appropriately within your repo – you can even do diffs/compares between these “releases” making it incredibly easy for you and your users to see what actually changed between versions (instead of relying on whatever half-assed notes you put in your “whatsnew” file.)

Here’s the official guide to Releases from GitHub and for a random example of someone from the BBS scene who is using this feature, check out Icy Board’s repo.

New Releases – September 2025

It’s time for another batch of releases from your friends at Demonic Productions!

First on the list is XQ-MineSweeper – xqtr’s Mystic Python (MPY) take on the Microsoft classic Minesweeper! I mean, who doesn’t love a little Minesweeper?! It can also be used as a bot checker if you’re a truly sick and twisted individual. As you should by now have come to expect from an xqtr Mystic mod, this release is completely and easily customizable.

XQTR is going to knock your lights out!

Not quite done with the entertainment, xqtr also brings us Lights Out v1.0, an impressive new ANSIfied take on the classic Lights Out game. This time it’s not a Mystic mod, however, but rather an actual 16-bit FOSSIL powered door, meaning you can run it on just about anything, even that old 386 you’re currently using as a doorstop. Oh, and it includes the Pascal source code too!

Next up is a bit more of a utility – less of a standalone mod and more something you can use in your own mods. Xqtr’s URL Downloader! is a Mythic Python script that lets users download files from the web and save them in their node’s temp directory on demand, which you can probably imagine could be useful for all kinds of purposes.

Similarly, xqtr rounds out his batch of new releases with XQ-DBASE, another Mystic Python script which lets users interface with data from a SQLite3 database. While this sounds more like something you might use for your own mods, it provides users with a handy user interface for browsing, and even includes some sample databases to play with. Of course, if you want to incorporate SQLite in your own mods, this will also serve as a nice example.

Next up, esc brings us two new entries in his series of refreshed and fixed versions of classic DayDream/Linux mods/doors. The first is a fixed version of UnLZX, a little utility to handle LZX archives. The other, similarly, is DMS DIZ 2.3, an updated version of a utility for extracting DIZ descriptions from .DMS files. Both of these releases were originally by Hamlet, and both include their c source code so someone else can fix them when they break again one day. 🙂

ESC hates editing text config files!

Never done tinkering with DayDream, esc has released the first beta version of his DayDream Configuration Editor, written in Python 3. Not 100% feature complete, but already a huge time-saver for DayDream/Linux SysOps! Try it out!

Finally, esc brings us his Demonic BBS Web Uploader. This little bash script uploads locally hosted files to a temporary web host and returns the URL to the user. Handy for users who can’t or don’t want to file with transferring files the old fashioned way, and with BBS software that don’t have their own web server. This should work with just about any Linux BBS too!

Oh, speaking of our buddy esc, his sweet Amiga ASCII filled BBS Monterey (running DayDream, naturally!) is finally opened to the public again. Check it out!