The bulletin board scene in 2026, from Synchronet to the Commodore 64

On 26 October 2026 the Telnet BBS Guide said it lists 1,085 "BBS and related systems", 50 of them added in the previous 30 days. The guide, run with The BBS Corner, says it has served the BBS community "for over 28 years" and lists dial-up boards as well as telnet ones. Boards come and go, so the figure is a snapshot. Synchronet's own list, exported from its author's board the same morning, holds 227 systems.

What follows comes from the projects' own pages and the boards' listings as published. RetroMake did not connect to any of the boards named here.

The server software

Five packages show how differently the projects now work.

Rob Swindell's Synchronet posted v3.21e for Windows on 17 March 2026, three weeks after v3.21c. His own board, Vertrauen, already reports running version 3.22 in the Synchronet list.

Mystic's news page has not moved since 15 January 2023, when its author, who signs as g00r00, announced 1.12 Alpha 48 for Windows, Linux, macOS and the Raspberry Pi. The downloads page still calls A48 "the latest stable release". The site's pre-alpha directory holds a further build, 1.12 A49, in files dated 29 May 2024.

ENiGMA 1/2 does not do versions in the usual sense. Its UPGRADE.md says the project "does not currently have much of a 'release process'", and that anyone who wants new features should git pull them. Its package.json says 0.6.0-beta and asks for Node.js 22 or later; the latest commit is dated 25 October 2026.

WWIV's last general release is WWIV 5.8 GA, tagged 5.8.1 on 24 December 2023. Development builds of 5.9 are still published as pre-releases, most recently build 3759 on 9 May 2026.

Renegade, the DOS package descended from Telegard, released v1.40/DOS on 1 March 2026, according to its official site. On 24 October 2026 the README of its GitHub repository announced that the repository held "the LAST open Source build of v1.40 + some fixes that are in v1.44/DOS", that it would not be updated again, and that Renegade was going closed source now that it had been ported to Free Pascal for DOS, Win32 and Linux.

The newest arrival is ViSiON/3, a Go rewrite of the 1990s ViSiON/2. It reached v0.9.4 on 29 September 2026 and describes its status as "PRE-ALPHA (Expect crashes, data loss, and general chaos)".

Terminals

SyncTERM released version 1.9 on 7 September 2026 after five release candidates. It is the third release since December 2025: 1.7 came out on 11 December and 1.8 on 20 April 2026. Its SourceForge description calls it a cross-platform terminal "designed to connect to remote BBSs via telnet, rlogin, or SSH", with ANSI music and the IBM character set. Mystic's own client, NetRunner, is still at 2.00 Beta 21 from 12 November 2020.

On the Commodore 64 side, the current version of the terminal program Craig Smith first wrote in 1985 is CCGMS Future 0.2, released by Michael Steil on 20 March 2022. It drives the user port, the faster UP9600 wiring and SwiftLink-style cartridges, speaks PETSCII and ASCII with some ANSI, and keeps a 30-entry phonebook with an auto-dialer that sends the modem an ATDT command.

Message networks

Message networks carry posts from board to board. In Synchronet's own list, 169 of the 227 boards give a DOVE-Net address, 81 a FidoNet address and 37 an fsxNet address; HobbyNet and tqwNet come next, with 14 each.

fsxNet calls itself "a fun, simple and experimental network established in late 2015". Its wiki was last edited on 27 September 2026, and it covers BBSing, ANSI art, amateur radio, retro computing and coding in a deliberately small number of message areas.

DOVE-Net is Synchronet's network. Its FAQ describes it as "a message network connecting numerous BBSes and the users on those BBSes together through QWK and Fido networking technologies", made up mostly of Synchronet boards because its founders wrote Synchronet. The same file names Rob Swindell as its network coordinator, or in its own word its "king".

FidoNet is still publishing nodelists, its directories of member systems. The nodelist-history lookup at nodehist.fidonet.org.ua indexes 7,111 of them, the first dated 3 October 1986 and the latest 26 October 2026. FidoNet's home page, last updated on 16 July 2026, links to that lookup, credited to Pavel Gulchouck, and to its Zone 1 and Zone 4 sites, but gives no current count of nodes. RetroMake has not found a published total.

Vertrauen's entry in the Synchronet list shows all three: DOVE-Net, FidoNet and fsxNet.

The Commodore boards

Commodore boards keep their own directories. The Oasis BBS publishes a Commodore listing, last updated on 14 March 2026, with 23 systems running Color 64, C*Base (listed as C-Base), Centipede 128, Zelch 128, VIC BBS, Magnetar and CNet on the Amiga. The Telnet BBS Guide files 23 boards under Image BBS, 14 under Color 64 and 14 under the two spellings of C*Base.

Image BBS is maintained in the open. Its GitHub repository carries versions 1.2a and 2.0 for the Commodore 64 and points to a separate repository for 3.0, which it calls "a radical departure". The same README, inviting readers to telnet to Image boards, says "Our network has 13 nodes". Color 64 boards in the listings report versions from 7.36 to 8.1a. The C*Base boards include one running "c*base 3.3.9 by Tao" and another on "HolyMoses modded C*Base 3.1".

Several of these boards say they run on the real machines. The 13th Floor BBS, restored from data taken offline on 29 April 1993, describes itself as "Running on actual C64 hardware: Breadbin, Lt. Kernal hard drive, TurboChameleon v2, and Ultimate 1541-II+". System One runs "Image 1.2B Enhanced on a Commodore 64 using an uIEC/SD card device and a Link232 device". Citadel 64 is a "Real Commodore 64 system running Color 64 v8 BBS". Cottonwood BBS runs "on a Commodore 64 computer with a 4 GB hard drive at 2400 baud" and still lists a dial-up number. Enterprise BBS runs on a Commodore 128 in 64 mode with 1571 and 1541 drives and a Pi1541. Darklevel lists its hardware as "C64R MK2, SuperCPU, RAMLink, HD, Turbo232, SD2IEC".

Others are open about running in emulation. Crazy Terminal now runs "in Windows 11 on the VICE emulator"; Wrong Number IV is "run on a PC in Emulation"; Fria Bad BBS runs "on a virtual c64". From outside, the listing is all a caller has to go on, and the sysops write the listings.

Boards to try

These addresses are copied from the listings named above, exactly as they give them. RetroMake has not connected to them, and listings go stale.

Vertrauen's listing links a PETSCII-40 service at vert.synchro.net:64 and a PETSCII-80 service at vert.synchro.net:128, so a Commodore terminal can call the home of Synchronet in its own character set. The ports vary from board to board, so copy the whole address, port included.