BBS Converter

Extract text from Bulletin board text files (BBS)


Drop or upload your .BBS file
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How to extract text from your BBS file

  1. Click the "Select File" button above, and choose your BBS file.
  2. You’ll see a preview, if available.
  3. Click the "Convert file to..." button to extract text information.

Convert BBS to another file type

To convert BBS Text files to another format, you need Notepad++ or other Text software.

Convert a file to BBS

To convert other file formats to the "BBS Text File" file type, you need software like Notepad++ or a similar tool.


About BBS files

A .bbs file is a legacy text format originally used by dial-up Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) in the 1980s and 1990s. These files typically store system messages, file descriptions, user logs, or drop file data for BBS door games. They are usually formatted as plain ASCII or incorporate ANSI escape sequences to display text-based graphics and colors. You can open them natively using vintage BBS software like Synchronet or modern text editors like Notepad++. The main disadvantage of the .bbs format is its obsolescence. Modern operating systems do not recognize the extension natively. Furthermore, if the file contains ANSI color codes, standard text editors will display raw, garbled characters instead of the intended formatting. To make these files readable today, you should convert them to TXT for simple text extraction, or to HTML and PDF to preserve the visual layout of any ANSI art. Note that converting to plain TXT will strip away all color codes. Standard online converters fail to process .bbs files because they do not recognize the extension as a standard text document.

Convert.Guru analyzes your BBS file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.

Users also converted DDS files.


FAQ

If you want to convert BBS file to TXT, RTF, DOC, DOCX, ODT, PAGES, TEX, LATEX, MD, MARKDOWN, LOG or NFO, you can use Notepad++ or similar software from the "Bulletin Board System Text" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….

To convert PDF, DOC, ASC, TODO, NFO, MEMO, README, DOCX, JPG, TXT, NOTE or RTF files to BBS, try Notepad++ or another comparable tool in the "Bulletin Board System Text" category.



The BBS Converter Story

The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our BBS converter.