Screenshots

The Terminal Aesthetic

The Exchange doesn’t just look retro. It IS retro — a real terminal application running on jterm, a JVM-based terminal framework. ANSI escape codes, cursor positioning, color, the works. But underneath, it’s Java 26, Postgres, and a reactive event bus.

ANSI Art Gallery

The BBS file archive includes hand-crafted and programmatically generated ANSI art. Here’s a taste of what’s in the archive.

Welcome Banner

The first thing you see on login — generated with the Phosphor ANSI art pipeline:

// In the login handler:
on login {
    if user.first_login {
        art = ansi_gen("THE EXCHANGE", font: "banner")
        colored = ansi_colorize(art, ansi_gradient(bright_green, bright_cyan))
        show_ansi(colored)
    } else {
        show "starfield.ans"
    }
    say "Welcome back, ${user.username}!"
}

Available Art Files

Screenshots (Coming Soon)

The BBS is under active development. Screenshots will be added as features come online:

Main Menu

• Animated transitions between menu items
• ANSI art header
• Status bar with online count, mail count, time

Live Chat

• Multiple channels (#lobby, #tech, #doors)
• Private messages
• User list with idle indicators
• Chat bot integration via Phosphor handlers

Message Boards

• Threaded discussion view
• Reactive feed — new posts appear without refresh
• Federated posts marked with origin node
• Board subscriptions with mail notifications

Mail

• Inbox with unread indicators
• Compose with rich text
• Folders: Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Netmail
• Mail filters via user scripts

Door Games

• Dungeon — multi-room adventure with ANSI art per room
• Scoreboard with high scores
• Save/load game state
• Real-time multi-player via reactive bindings

Phosphor Editor

• Syntax-highlighted .phos files
• Auto-complete for keywords and events
• Live parse feedback
• Save-to-apply: edit a file, hit Ctrl+S, see the change live

Hot-Reload Demo

• Edit a .phos file in the editor
• Watch the BBS update without restart
• Parse errors show inline, old config preserved

Federation

• Two nodes syncing in real-time
• Post on Node A appears on Node B
• Reconnect triggers backfill

These screenshots will be captured and uploaded as each phase of the implementation completes. Follow the dev log for updates.