Nitemare Cafe

I am currently working on bringing the BBS back. Currently, I have Synchronet running on a laptop, but I really miss my WWIV days. I have several conflicting ideas, starting with what package to use. My options are WWIV 5.x, WWIV 4.x (I still have my reg code), Synchronet, and Major BBS. All of them are trivial to run under Windows, but I’m seriously considering Linux. I kinda want to gut an old external modem and put a Raspberry Pi inside of it. I could even repurpose the modem LEDs for different indicators. My favorite idea is to use WWIV 4.x, but because each node would need it’s own instance of DOSbox, I’m not sure how viable it is. Filesystem caching is easily overcome by telling it you’re mounting a floppy disk (but it never reports that there’s more than 1.4MB free space, even if you have gigs), but DOSbox itself it a bit resource intensive for the Pi. I’m not sure if it can be tweaked enough to get several instances to run at once. Maybe if I tell each instance it’s a 286 with text-only video? For the record, I also have a proof-of-concept single node running on my Pi, but DOSbox has not been tweaked. Maybe I’ll do some tweaking before deciding for sure.