LORD Setup

LORD — Legend of the Red Dragon by Seth Robinson, 1989 — is the
canonical door game and a good test target for DOS Door Recipe
because it exercises all the door plumbing at once.

Prerequisites

• DOSBox-staging built with --enable-nullmodem (default in 0.81+)
• Xvfb if you want to run headless
• The LORD binaries (LORD.EXE, LORDCFG.EXE, LORD.DAT, etc.)
  in a directory you own — /var/lib/anetbbs/doors/lord/

DOSBox config

lord.conf next to the binaries. Key sections:

[serial]
serial1 = nullmodem server:9001
serial2 = disabled

[autoexec]
mount c .
c:
LORDCFG -nodes 1
LORD /N1 /B19200

COM1 is the bridge port (matched on the BBS side); LORDCFG runs
once to write NODE1.DAT; then LORD launches in "single-node, COM1
at 19200" mode.

Bridge wiring

The BBS process opens a TCP connection to localhost:9001 and
ferries bytes between the user's terminal writer and the socket.
That's the DosBridge class — see DosBridge.

LORDCFG gotchas

• LORDCFG writes NODE1.DAT (or NODE<n>.DAT) into the working
  dir. It's a binary config blob — leave it alone between runs.
• The dropfile path inside LORDCFG should be .\ (current dir),
  not absolute, because DOSBox-staging's path mounting confuses
  some doors otherwise.
• DOOR.SYS COM0 means "carrier present"; set to COM1 for the
  bridge to think it's on a real port. ANetBBS writes this
  correctly out of the box.

Exit hangs

If LORD's exit doesn't release Xvfb cleanly, the watchdog needs
a waitpid on DOSBox plus an idle timeout. ANetBBS does both —
xvfb-run will hang past door exit if not babysat. The fallback
is Ctrl+]q which the bridge translates to DOSBox's "kill
emulator" sequence.

See also

• DOS Door Recipe
• DosBridge
• Door Setup