Clients

To connect to AlteredReality you will need some kind of client, either a ssh/telnet client or a mud client. You do not need a dedicated mud client to play, as most features of most mud clients have been built in to AlteredReality for your convenience, so a free ssh or telnet program will be more than good enough (and sometimes better) if you don't have a preferred client already. We recommend the following clients:

Mac OS X

• RECOMMENDED: Terminal, which comes with OS X, is a good terminal emulator which supports all of the mud's features. It is recommended that you change the background color to dark grey/black, the foreground text color to light grey/white, and the text encoding to UTF-8, all of which can be found in the preferences. To connect using SSH (recommended), just type "ssh -p 4005 ar.static.net" (without quotes), or with telnet, use "telnet ar.static.net 4000".

Mac OS 9 and earlier

• RECOMMENDED: SlightlyBetterTelnet, a cleaned up (by Nalgas and Foom) version of BetterTelnet, which itself is a very good, cleaned up version of the NSCA telnet client, with support for all the basics. SlightlyBetterTelnet has a preset connection for the mud as the default in the Favorites menu.
• Rapscallion, a good MUD/MOO client with lots of features: color, speedwalks, triggers, channels, etc.
• TO AVOID: Older versions of BetterTelnet have problems with their VT100 handling, and particularly old ones won't even do scrollback properly in VT100 mode. You will not be happy.

Windows

• RECOMMENDED: PuTTY, a very good telnet/ssh/xterm client for Windows which supports all the special features of the mud. To connect using SSH (recommended), enter "ar.static.net" for the host and "4005" for the port. To use plain telnet, select the Telnet button, use "ar.static.net" for the host, and "4000" for the port.
• TO AVOID: zMUD, Zugg's MUD Client, with support for all the basics like color, aliases, macros, triggers, buttons, etc., but without proper support (proper meaning that it claims it works, but it seems to be buggy) for some of the newer features of the mud, like VT100 mode and SSH connections. We DO NOT recommend this client, although a few people still seem to like it.

Unix/Linux

• RECOMMENDED: At the command line, simply type "ssh -p 4005 ar.static.net" to connect using SSH (recommended), or "telnet ar.static.net 4000" to use regular telnet.
• TinTin++, is a command-line text client for UNIX shell accounts. It supports color, complex aliases and actions, tab completion, and more, but doesn't support SSH and doesn't seem to work reliably with the mud's VT100 mode.

Alternatively, you can connect using a Java applet from any web browser supporting Java.