Not heathen, just old. Haha!

Edit: my first BBS ran on an Atari 800XL with software written by Jeff Minter. Had to hack up a ring detector for the lame Atari 1200 baud modem. Lol!

Renegade really was the apex of the BBS era.

BBS software was very regional and scene specific. A lot of Midwestern Warez guys loved Renegade, and Cott Lang hated that! The really cool warez guys ran PC Board (for some reason), or a Fourm hack which looked cool but seemed buggy.

I think Renegade's non-warez scene competition was TAG, WWIV, Wildcat and (of course) Telegard. I kind of liked all of them for various reasons!

was it renegade or remote access that used to play a bleepy rendition of guns n' roses on the pc speaker?

RemoteAccess used that as the default Sysop page tune. It could be replaced, though.