Bolo TV. Nix came up with this clever hack. Rumor has it that wharf rat reverse-engineered the elusive Bolo log viewer, allowing the playback of a logged game afterwards. As Bolo history buffs may know, Stuart allegedly created the logging feature as a contract job for the US Army which wanted to learn battle strategy from playing Bolo, or something wacky like that. Stuart put the logging feature into the game, but delivered the log viewer only to the Army. [Note - this entry was corrected and expanded on Dec 2 to give proper credit to wharf rat. Nobody tells me anything any more. Sniff.]

Chicago meeting. Max and Jolo were in Chicago a few days ago and did manage to meet up with Squelcher, Polarboy, and Sol. No Bolo transpired, but we watched the Duke/Illinois men's basketball game together.

Bolo and Mac OS X. Last time (see next entry below) I mentioned that WinBolo/LinBolo may eventually be released for Mac OS X. I should have clarified by saying that the original Mac Bolo works just fine as is on OS X, as shown by this screen shot (246K) contributed by vert.

Is WB really Bolo? There are many subtle differences between Bolo and WinBolo, but only a handful of Mac Bolo veterans have the experience and skills to appreciate them right now. Here is an interesting conversation from the IRC channel #bolo on EFnet, where several people chatted about this issue.

We got /.'ed! Speaking of IRC, the geeks among you will appreciate this. I wrote a little rant late one night to address the countless newbies who were confused by the rumors about EFnet dying. We ended up getting cited by the very well-read SlashDot - here's the original article. The term "slashdotted" refers to getting so many web hits that your server ceases responding, and indeed we did get over 10,000 hits in just a few hours, but fortunately that was well within our capacity.

Linux Bolo released! After much anticipation, the port of John Morrison's WinBolo to Linux is complete! The new version 1.08a comes in 2 separate packages for Windows/Intel and Linux/Intel, and they are totally network compatible so that people can play with each other, sharing the same official home page, tracker, documentation, etc. This is the first time ever that a full-featured Bolo game has allowed true cross-platform play. Learn more and download it from our WB page.

New WinBolo/LinBolo home page. Speaking of home pages, there is a new domain name, winbolo.com, to support its brand new home page at www.winbolo.com and a new alias to the existing tracker at tracker.winbolo.com. There are also lots of improvements to the tracker, hopefully making it more useful and stable.

Ironically, the new WinBolo/LinBolo are not compatible with the original Mac Bolo. For Mac players to get in on this new action, there will need to be a Mac clone of the WinBolo/LinBolo clone of this original Mac game, if that makes sense. With the advent of the BSD-based Mac OS X, this may come very soon indeed.

Bolo in Japan. Twice now, the MACLIFE magazine published in Japan has included Bolo (specifically the starter package formerly known as Jolopak) in their free CD included with each issue. These guys are amazing - the latest issue is nearly 350 pages and weighs like 2 pounds! It's full of ads and articles, all in Japanese of course, bigger even than the old MacWorld's from the '80s. I took some pictures of the covers (compare to Lombard G3 PowerBook for size) and spines (compare to a certain men's magazine for thickness).

MacHack again. On June 26 we reported that Stuart and a few Bolo vets were seen at MacHack. Here's part of the MacWorld article which has a picture (we think) of Ed Wynne aka White Pisswater (3rd picture, guy seated wearing 3D glasses).

BMAPEdit 4.1. This latest update of the premiere Mac Bolo map editor by Carl Osterwald aka wharf rat replaces 4.0 which you can still get from our archives, but 4.1 is not a public release. He calls it "emailware" - if you paid the shareware, just email him directly to ask for this update. If you haven't yet, it's really time you did. There are over 3,000 maps in our map archive alone, at least 75% were created with his utility. Let's just say on a earnings per map or per hour spent basis, wharf could've made a lot more just flipping burgers. Anyways, here are the changes:

• Now draws maps with bases and PBs located in the same square correctly (the sluggo effect)
• Fixed update bug that hosed maze fill
• View option for showing/hiding symmetry axes added
• 68000 compiler optimization level reduced to eliminate crash caused by the optimizer
• Crash in patterns MDEF when running on Mac OS 8.5 fixed (a call to StuffHex() had to be eliminated)
• Polygon point tracking now properly rounds to the nearest map square corner
• Bad mark character in symmetry popup menu eliminated
• View option for displaying maps in brighter, more distinct colors added (same colors used in Bolo 0.99.7a)
• BMAPEdit now uses Mac OS 8.6 floating windows if available
• Support for Mac OS 8.5 file proxy icons in map windows added
• File type popup in Save As... dialog now has Bolo map format available when Mac OS 9 is running
• Additional Mac OS 8.6 Window Manager calls are now used if available
• Symmetry indicator with popup menu added to map windows
• Tiled random map now sets the symmetry selected in the tiled random map dialog

MacHack Stuart Sighting. Yes, it's time for the MacHack meeting and our annual Stuart sighting. This year there are a few other familiar faces in the crowd too. Stuart Cheshire (the author of Bolo) and Ed Wynne aka White Pisswater (one of Bolo's oldest vets) not only attended MacHack, they were each on 2 of the winning teams in the "Top 5 Hacks" awards. I also noticed Andrew Welch aka Berserkir (owner of Ambrosia Software and another Bolo vet) among the "scenes from MacHack" picture album - in the top left picture, he's the guy in a black shirt and blue cap. (Thanks to Dave Thorup for the tip.)

WinBolo 1.05 was released today. Quoting from John Morrison on r.g.b.: "Some significant changes are included. A 40 page user manual, Linux server port, Windows NT support, (NT4 SP5) internationalised, localised as well as other changes." In case you missed it, yes, you can now serve WB on a Linux box, and the Linux game client is being actively developed. This is a significant development as WinBolo positions itself as the first to become a cross-platform Bolo. You can learn more and download it from our WB page.

Parallel Universes. Here's a demonstration of an amusing Bolo bug. Nix was in a game where the ring was broken. He quit and started a new game. Moments later, the Bolo programs still running in the old game tried to rebuild the ring with him automatically, and because it was an automatic rejoin, did not bother to check the unique game ID or to load the map. The result was that the old and new games got merged into one. Depending on your point of view, you would be in one of two maps. The result is that you can do goofy things like plant mines in deep sea, or you would see a pillbox go crazy firing at nothing. Here's what it looked like in a screen capture (100 K) and the tracker. Note how nix is shown twice.

Modem Players Beware. By popular request I'm repeating this plea - if you are a modem player, it's very important that you never ever join a multi-player game. You will ruin it for everybody else and ensure that nobody will ever want to play with you. If you haven't yet, please read our etiquette guidelines.

Bolo 0.99.7a. Before you get all excited, it's not really a new version, but we do recommend everybody get it from the Bolo Archive and "upgrade" to it. Carl Osterwald aka wharf rat made this unauthorized variant of 0.99.7 using ResEdit. Specifically he...

• took out the debugstr() calls which caused Bolo to crash if you tried to start a new game without quitting first,
• changed the default tracker from the long-defunct noproblem.uchicago.edu to a new alias for the current official tracker, bolotrack.cass.usu.edu, which is the same as current bolo.usu.edu but designed to have the same number of characters in order to avoid messing up the rest of Bolo, and
• brightened all the colors in order to enhance the contrast during intense battle scenes - it takes a little getting used to, but all the vets love it!

New Archive. To accomodate the new Bolo 0.99.7a, we've revamped the Bolo Archive, which serves up some of the most popular/recent binaries pertaining to Bolo. In particular, there is a new Starter Pack 2.0, replacing the old JoloPak, incorporating Bolo 0.99.7a, the new Bolo Buddy 2 (see previous news below), a new expanded collection of maps (as suggested by Don Thompson aka nix, keeper of the bolo.usu.edu game tracker and all around Bolo Godfather), and a revised web link to the short FAQ. You can also get Bolo Buddy 2, BMAPEdit 4, and the map collection each by itself. Also for the first time, we've taken out the author Stuart Cheshire's original documentation, and made that available separately in the archive too. Although this is somewhat radical, we think it's a reasonable thing to do, since the game is obviously no longer being developed by Stuart any more, and those docs are really quite out of date and are only of historical interest now. Instead we recommend new and old users check out the Bolo Guides, which happen to include many of Stuart's docs in web format anyway.

Return of the Vets? With the advent of broadband to the home (cable modems and DSL), many vets seem to be returning to Bolo action. In the last few months, a half dozen or so vets have come out of retirement to play regularly. It's not exactly a trend yet, but it's certainly nice.

WinBolo update. In rapid succession, 1.03 and 1.04 were released back in March. There are quite a few changes, most pertaining to making WinBolo an even more perfect mimic of Mac Bolo. As a whole, WinBolo seems to be thriving nicely about half a year after its initial release. There have been several thousand downloads of WinBolo to date, including nearly 900 in the month of May alone. The WinBolo tracker is now run from our site as well, although you can and should continue to use its alias, bolo.zoid.com. Sometimes there are far more games on the WinBolo tracker compared to the Mac Bolo tracker, but most WB games are still newbie-oriented open Everard games. It's still very encouraging though, and WB's author John Morrison has assured me he is committed to continued development.

WinBolo 1.02. The new version contains mostly bug fixes, with a few new features - see the author's list of changes. The biggest change is the integrated game finder, akin to Bolo Buddy for the Mac. You can download it at our WinBolo page which contains links to the author's official page too.

Bolo Buddy 2. Speaking of Bolo Buddy, the GUI Internet Bolo game finder, a new version is out. There are several new features, most notably a "spy" feature that lets you check a specific IP:port to see if it is playing Bolo. Maybe bosses can use this to check up on employees?

WinBolo 1.01 released! In case you've been living under a rock, this full clone of Bolo won the 4-way clone race and finally released late that year. It's shareware and perfectly legal. This is the first ever full-featured clone to be released to the public, and has the blessings of the original Mac Bolo's author Stuart Cheshire. We are now up to version 1.01. See our new WinBolo page for details, downloading, and other links.

Happy New Year! Sorry I haven't been updating the news, I've just been way too busy lately. There's been a lot of news lately, and hopefully you've seen the posts on rec.games.bolo or #bolo.

Duke Bolofest 2k. John Weaver aka Devilspawn from the Univ of Maryland at Baltimore and his friend Amy drove down to Durham, NC to pay us a visit. We took the opportunity to have our annual Duke bolofest, with Devilspawn joining the local players Max, pins, and Jolo, all playing out of Max's house. Here are pictures of the event.

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