ALPHARMD // CONNECT

WHY BOTHER

The browser terminal works, but it is a terminal and nothing more. A real MUD client gives you triggers, aliases, a scripting language, an automatic mapper that draws the world as you walk it, and a scrollback that survives a page refresh. On anything with more than twenty rooms the difference is not subtle.

Every game here is an ordinary telnet service, so any client from the last thirty years will talk to it.

CLIENTS WORTH HAVING

CLIENT	PLATFORM	GET IT	NOTES
Mudlet	Win / Mac / Linux	mudlet.org	Start here. Lua scripting, and the mapper is the best in the genre — it reads GMCP where the game sends it and draws the world as you walk it.
TinTin++	Terminal, everywhere	tintin.mudhalla.net	Runs inside the terminal you already have. Tiny, fast, scriptable, and the one to use over SSH from elsewhere.
Blightmud	Linux / Mac	github.com/Blightmud	Modern, written in Rust, Lua scripting. Terminal-based like TinTin++ with a gentler start.
MUSHclient	Windows	gammon.com.au	Old, free and still excellent — especially for the MUSH and MOO side, which is what it was built around.

Where the codebase supports it, GMCP is enabled for mappers and MSSP for status. The older Diku derivatives emit CP437 rather than UTF-8 — if the box-drawing characters come through as accented letters, that is the setting to change.

CONNECTING TODAY

This site runs with no inbound ports. Every connection is made outbound from the rack through a tunnel, which is a property worth more than the convenience of an open telnet port — so there is no host:port to paste into Mudlet yet.

You can still use a desktop client. Cloudflare's own tool opens the tunnel from your side and hands you a local port:

cloudflared access tcp --hostname mud.alpharmd.co.uk --url localhost:4000

Leave that running, then point your client at localhost port 4000. Traffic goes out from your machine to Cloudflare and out from the rack to Cloudflare; nothing is listening anywhere.

Install cloudflared — official downloads, or brew install cloudflared / winget install Cloudflare.cloudflared
Run the command above and leave the window open
In Mudlet: New Profile → host localhost, port 4000
Connect. The MUD's own login screen appears exactly as it would over telnet.

One tunnel serves one game at a time. Change --url to a different local port and run a second copy for a second game.

BBS CLIENTS // PENDING

A BBS is coming, and it will be built for real clients rather than a web terminal, because half of what made a BBS a BBS lives in the client: CP437 block graphics, ANSI music, and ZMODEM file transfer.

The board will run Synchronet — telnet, SSH and its own web interface, with the original DOS door games running natively beside it. Grab a terminal now if you want to be ready.

CLIENT	PLATFORM	GET IT	NOTES
SyncTERM	Win / Mac / Linux	syncterm.net	The standard, and the one to get. Telnet, rlogin and SSH, correct CP437 with the original bitmap fonts, ANSI music, ZMODEM transfers. Everything a board needs, in one program.
NetRunner	Windows	mysticbbs.com	From Mystic's author. Excellent font and graphics handling if SyncTERM's rendering does not suit you.
fTelnet	Browser	already here	The same client this site uses for the MUDs, so the board gets a browser door for free — minus ZMODEM and ANSI music, which no browser can do.

WHY IT WILL NOT BE ON A RASPBERRY PI — the classic door games (LORD, Trade Wars 2002, Usurper) are DOS real-mode binaries. There is no ARM build and there never will be, so the board runs on the x86 nodes in the rack. The doors sit on the same machine rather than across the network, because a BBS hands a door its session by writing a dropfile to disk and the door reads it back — that handshake is a shared filesystem by design, and splitting it over a network is how you get a door that hangs on every third launch.