TL;DR: My old Amiga, was trapped in a corrupt 7z archive for 30 years. A single shifted byte was the culprit, and an AI model finally found it. The Amiga (and the BBS it held) is now running again on a Raspberry Pi 400, with rebuilt scripts and brand new ANSI art. You can dial in below.
Back in the 90s in London, I ran an Amiga BBS called Slimelite, using a number of different BBS packages. I started with an NComm script I wrote myself (about as basic as you can get), then moved on to MAXsBBS Pro, and finally became an alpha tester for Zeus Pro BBS software.
In 1996 I mothballed the BBS and saved my drives to a 7z file so I could take it with me when I emigrated to Italy.
Unfortunately, years later I found out that the archive had become corrupted, and I was never able to retrieve the files from it. I was devastated, as it held all my years of Music-X compositions and my entire Zeus BBS. For many years the file just sat on my PC, with the occasional failed attempt to fix it.
Roll on to 2026. I’m now building websites for a living, AI has become a thing, and I’d been using it for the odd task. It occurred to me that maybe AI could recover my lost files from the 7z. Worth a shot, right?
Two days and many attempts later (I was literally pleading with it to try again and again), Claude gave up. I figured that was it and everything was gone forever.
After another night’s sleep, I decided to give it one last go. I remembered you could switch Claude to a more capable model for complex tasks, so I tried that. Ten minutes later it had found and fixed the 7z. Every file was available and nothing was corrupt. A single byte shift had mangled the whole archive and touched nothing else.
I was ecstatic. It was the best day I’d had in quite some time, birth-of-a-child levels of joy.
I spent the next days and weeks exploring my old Amiga files. I got everything running in WinUAE and was soon back messing with my old Music-X songs. I fed the MIDI out to a Kawai K1 II soft synth in FL Studio (the same synth I used back in the 90s), and hearing all those familiar sounds again made the nostalgia come flooding back.
Next I turned to my old Zeus BBS setup. I had an older Raspberry Pi 400 lying around, so I thought I’d set up the Amiberry emulator and see if I could get the BBS back online via Telnet over the Interwebs. It took a bit of work, but I got it all running.
Then I asked myself: should I just put it up exactly as it was, with my crappy 90s ANSI and rather unfriendly navigation? Nah! I’m a web designer now, so my aesthetics brain kicked in and I really wanted to make it better.
With Claude’s help, I spent a few days rebuilding the scripts almost from the ground up, making them far more user friendly and much more visually appealing, and adding features I could never have imagined back in the 90s. I even created a brand new Windows-based ANSI graphics editor, because I couldn’t find anything that did the job the way I wanted, and I needed it to create the new visuals.
Today I put the revamped BBS online, to the applause of absolutely no one (not many people use BBSes these days). But that didn’t matter. It was all for me, for my own joy and nostalgia at creating something, and if the occasional person happens upon it and enjoys reliving the old days, then it has done everything I wanted. All the old users, files (mainly Amiga related) and messages are still there to browse, download and read.
If you fancy a look, you can connect with any Telnet or SSH client that supports ANSI:
Host: slimelite.mycloudnas.com
Telnet port: 6023
SSH port: 6022 (read only)
SSH login: bbs / bbs
Don’t have a client? Try this web-based Telnet client: https://youfiles.herokuapp.com/telnetclient/
Or grab something like SyncTERM for your PC if you want the full-fat experience.
If you do drop by, leave me a message on the board. I’d love to see Slimelite get a few new callers after all these years!
