Renegade (BBS)

Renegade is a freeware bulletin board system (BBS) written for IBM PC-compatible computers running MS-DOS that gained popularity among hobbyist BBSes in the early to mid 1990s. It was originally written by Cott Lang in Pascal, based on the source code of Telegard, which was in turn based on the earlier WWIV.

Transfer of control

On April 23, 1997, after the decline of BBS popularity, Lang ceased development work on Renegade and passed it on to two Renegade BBS utility authors: Patrick Spence and Gary Hall. Spence and Hall maintained Renegade for three years, releasing three updates with their new, ordinal date version scheme.

Jeff Herrings, another former third-party software developer, was handed the source by Spence in January 2000 after offering help when he found there was no Y2K-compliant version of the software. Herrings released a public alpha version of Renegade in March 2000 addressing Y2K-compliance problems. He stepped down as active programmer in October 2001 citing lack of time and desire.

Renegade Software

Renegade Software was a UK-based games publisher, founded in 1991 by the Bitmap Brothers.

Initially the Bitmap Brothers used the new label to publish their own games, after they had become dissatisfied with the practices of publishing companies (their previous games were published by Mirrorsoft). Their stated goal was to give game developers more artistic freedom and more recognition. One of the first games released by Renegade Software was Magic Pockets, for which they had struck a deal with music publisher Rhythm King to include a Betty Boo song in the game.

Later Renegade also published games by other developers and went on as one of the successful independent publishers of its time, until it was acquired by Warner Interactive (run by Time Warner) in 1995, still publishing under the Renegade label. Subsequently in 1997 Warner Interactive was sold to GT Interactive (later Infogrames) and the Renegade label ceased to exist.

Games