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TTGWIKI

TTGWIKI reads the public pages of this wiki on DOS (TTGWIKI.EXE, C++, Open Watcom, 8086 code, mTCP) and on Windows 95 and later (TTGWIKIW.EXE, Winsock, in a console window). A DOS machine cannot speak HTTPS, so the server side of the same repository exports the wiki as plain text files, and the Teletype Games FTP server shares them over anonymous, read-only FTP, next to the DOSINST store.

A page is downloaded when it is read and kept on the disk, so it can be read again offline; F6 downloads them all. The export follows the wiki within 15 minutes.

TTGWIKI reading a page in DOSBox

What it does

  • The contents list the pages as a tree with the date of their last change. Typing searches the titles, ignoring case and accents (kezdo finds Kezdőlap). F2 switches between English and Hungarian; a page without a translation is shown in the language it is written in, marked [en].
  • The reader shows a page as the wiki has it: headings, lists, code blocks, quotes and tables, in colors. Tab / Shift+Tab select the links and the status line tells where they go, Enter follows a link to another page, Backspace goes back. A web link is only shown: open it on another machine.
  • Offline: a page read once stays in CACHE\ next to the executable. When the server cannot be reached, TTGWIKI says so and reads from the disk. A refused connection is reported at once on master; 0.2.0 still waits out mTCP's 10-second connect timeout first. F6 (or TTGWIKI SYNC) downloads every page of a language.
  • Fresh: at start and on F5 TTGWIKI reads WIKI.INI from the server. When the export has a new generation, the new page list comes and the pages that changed are deleted from the disk, so they are downloaded again when they are read. Nothing else is downloaded.
  • Printing: TTGWIKI SHOW /dos/gmenu > PRN prints a page as plain text.
  • Code pages: CODEPAGE=852 in TTGWIKI.CFG shows every Hungarian letter; in 437 (the default) the missing ones become a near letter (ő → ö).
TXT
TTGWIKI                    browse the wiki
TTGWIKI SYNC         download every page of a language
TTGWIKI SHOW route   print a page

How it works

TXT
 wiki.teletypegames.org (Grav)
        │  /custom/sitemap.json, /custom/page.json (inside the wiki's docker network)
        ▼
 exporter (server/export.py)   at start, then every 15 minutes
        │  WIKI.INI, EN/INDEX.TXT, EN/FILES.LST, EN/P0000001.TXT, ... HU/...
        ▼
 FTP (infra/ftp-server)        ftp://ftp.teletypegames.org/WIKI
        │
        ▼
 TTGWIKI.EXE / TTGWIKIW.EXE    CACHE\EN\..., CACHE\HU\...
  • The exporter reads the same JSON endpoints as the TTG Wiki BBS, renders every public page's HTML as text (server/render.py) and writes a folder per language. A restart exports at once. A new export is written only when something changed; the language folders are swapped in with renames and WIKI.INI comes last with the next generation number. A failed run (the wiki down) changes nothing.
  • Private pages never leave the server: they are dropped from the sitemap, and without a token Grav does not give out their text anyway.
  • A page file has header lines (TITLE=, URL=, L=<n> <target> for each link), then lines of at most 78 characters, UTF-8. Control bytes that take no column mark the styles (01h c) and the links (02h n 03h … 04h); every line is complete in itself, so the reader can start anywhere. TTGWIKI turns the text into the code page of the screen, one byte for every character, and reads a page a line at a time from the disk (the longest page has nearly 3000 lines).
  • Ids stay: a page gets a number once (P0000123.TXT), read back from INDEX.TXT on every export; the two languages share it, so F2 shows the same page.
  • FILES.LST has the CRC-32 and the size of every file, in DOSINST's format: every download is checked.

The server

The ttgwiki stack on vps.teletype.hu (/srv/stacks/ttgwiki, compose.yaml) is the exporter alone. It writes the WIKI folder of the FTP server (/srv/stacks/ftp-server/root/WIKI), which shares it on port 21: anonymous, read-only, passive mode only. Since 0.2.0 TTGWIKI connects there by default (PORT=21, PATH=/WIKI); 0.1.0 used port 2121, which is closed. The exporter joins the network of the wiki-pages stack. A push to master that changes the server side deploys it from the pipeline.

Building and tests

Open Watcom v2, as for DOSINST: SOURCE/build.sh builds both executables. The client is in layers on DOSLIB (which got the code pages 437 / 852 and seeking in files for it). The pipeline runs the server side's tests (the renderer, the exporter on a fake wiki), the client's unit tests on the host, and two end-to-end tests: the exporter writes a small export, the FTP server shares it, and TTGWIKI runs in a headless DOSBox Staging (printing, downloading, a new export, code page 852, offline, browsing with scripted keys) and TTGWIKIW under Wine. The steps are commands of the dos-tools builder image (git.teletypegames.org/build/dos-builder), with the toolchain preinstalled; the repo holds only the platform: dos marker and its metadata.json. A vX.Y.Z tag publishes the release to the catalog, and the WarpEngine puts both builds into the DOSINST store, its DOS shelf (without TTGWIKI.CFG); there is no store step. The deploy of the server side (.woodpecker/deploy.yaml) only calls the server's deploy user over SSH, with a key bound to one fixed command (ci-deploy ttgwiki; infra/host-config): the server clones master itself and checks compose.yaml against a policy, so the pipeline needs no trusted volumes. Details: the repository's README.