1997 || Jan-Mar | Apr-Sep | Oct-Dec 1998

IBL is dead! Believe it or not this is still news to approximately 1 newbie per week. The Internet Bolo League has been long gone folks, and even the Middlebury/Geocities mirror page has turned into the home page of Jaté, an attractive 16 year old girl - just right for the Middlebury guys, if they date older women.

Unofficial Tank Assault Page. So much information had come in regarding MegaWatt's Java Bolo clone project called Tank Assault that I figured I'd just make a Tank Assault page. With MW's cooperation, we will keep you up to date on all his progress. Right now there are 3 separate sections, the first is the long article from Mar 10 right here in Bolo News, the second is some comments on a Bolo server, and the third is a brand new summary of the project that I just got from MW yesterday.

I just added a non-technical discussion of client/server networking. This compares and contrasts Bolo's ring networking to the proposed new system, with some real examples drawn from typical Bolo playing.

PC Bolo Wannabes. These are either the 18th and 19th respective PC Bolo projects allegedly in progress, or yet more hoaxes. The only reason I even give them publicity here is for general amusement, and to minimize newbie ignorance since both have been publicized on the newsgroup already. Both projects are stuck at the "just one screen cap" phase, heck for all I know they're the same people. Check them out for yourself at site 1 and site 2.

New Iconz4maps. The venerable map guru Carl Osterwald aka wharf rat just released the latest version of his utility to generate cute icons for Bolo maps, Iconz4maps 1.2.1. Here's what's new (from his Read Me file):

I was abusing QuickDraw in a way that sometimes resulted in a corrupt map icon and eventually would cause a crash on PowerPC machines. Hopefully this has been corrected.

It now appears that the scriptable Finder in MacOS 8.1 still ignores Apple events that tell it to remove a custom icon. Therefore, holding the option key down and dragging a map file or a folder of maps to Iconz4Maps did not clear the icons if the system version was 8.0 or 8.1. For these cases, the application now removes them manually.

As the years passed and nothing happened, many people got impatient and contemplated writing their own clones. To avoid the AA dilemma, they either (1) plan to just release it for free, thus minimizing (although probably not absolving) them from legal repercussions, or (2) they feel that if they reverse engineer Bolo on their own using their own code, they can't be sued, citing successful cloning projects like Linux for UNIX and Windows for MacOS. I probably get at least one email a week from some wannabe or another, and almost all of them turn out to be either outright hoaxes or some kid who just took an introduction to programming class and thinks he's got what it takes to develop a sophisticated network game. If you read back through previous news, you'll find all sorts of references to both groups. There are two possible exceptions, however, to all the wannabes.

First, several high school kids headed up by Barath Raghavan at the York School started the so-called "Gnolo" or GNU Bolo project last fall. Their idea is to tackle the PC port of a Bolo-like game as a learning experience, have fun, and release it for free under the GNU general public license. The game will likely be very different from Bolo in its look and feel, but with customizable modules so that hypothetically one could make it act like Bolo. Barath has been in touch with Stuart over the past few months, and at least so far Stuart is cautiously encouraging, probably because he doesn't perceive the kids as a threat. Last I heard from them, they were still working on the graphics and other rudimentary design features.

Second, Aaron Bratcher aka MegaWatt started work on "Tank Assault", a Java Bolo port at about the same time. MW is not your typical lamer - he's been playing Bolo since its inception as an Internet game, and while at the University of Chicago, he assembled the first FTP archive of Bolo software which is the precursor to the current Bolo FTP archive at Duke, and he also administered the official Bolo tracker which preceded bolo.usu.edu. On top of all that, he's an accomplished programmer and Mac software developer. Anyway, MW plans on writing a client-server Java Bolo from scratch, which would at once eliminate the networking problems plaguing Bolo as well as providing a multi-platform port. He's progressing slowly but surely, and hopes to have a tank driving around a map by the end of this month.

At this rate who knows, maybe by summer or so we'll have multiple competing Bolo clones?!? As always, don't get your hopes up and you won't be disappointed. :-) Stay posted. If I hear something and I am legally permitted to share the news, I will always do so right here.

Top 10 players of all time. Athena recorded this interesting IRC discussion on a controversial subject. We've often seen lists of the top players at any one time, but this is the first one of all time, particularly from the perspective of the upcoming 6th anniversary of Bolo (version 0.9 was the first "genuine" public release, on 4/24/92). For those of you with no patience, the list was (in no particular order): Samhain, Hillbilly Bob, Black Lightning, bleak, grinch, santa, Noriko, Guy, Severian, and vert.

If you're having problems, there's always tracker.avara.com port 50000 or the WWW equivalent. Don't forget to register your Bolo game to the new tracker to ensure your new games show up there. (Normally the trackers "scam" game information from each other, that feature was only working from Avara to USU but the other way will be fixed soon.)

Iconz4Maps updated. Carl Osterwald aka wharf rat, our resident map guru, just released Iconz4Maps 1.2 for creating custom icons for Bolo map files based on the terrain of the map. It fixes several bugs such as the inability to drop a folder of maps onto the application and some incompatibilities with MacOS 8.x.

Network outage. We apologize for the network problems over the weekend. Our ATM switch blew up yet again, and we had to steal a replacement from the MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) area up in the hospital to get back online. Don't ask what we did with patients in the meantime. :) The Bolo home page was down for much of Saturday, and the FTP archive for the whole weekend. For those of you who don't know, these are served off machines in the Digital Imaging Research Division, part of the Department of Radiology at Duke University Medical Center.

Profiles in Black. The lovable El Flaggo wrote: "What up? I've just completed a fairly major update of the Player Profiles page, so I wondered if you would be so good as to note that in the Bolo News section.. I'm going to post to rgb, but I know there are a lot of junkies who slaver hungrily on your every word :) I've written a few new ones, rewritten or added to old ones, and finally added all of Athena and Chop's profiles that I've had for months."

Las FAQ reducida de Bolo. Miguel Alarcia aka Grolo contributed a Spanish translation of the short Bolo FAQ, in exchange for the right to publish the FAQ in e-Sprites, his Spanish e-zine for Mac shareware.

Geezerfest. Santa and Tempest have been hanging out on #bolo and Tempest is actually playing again. They are among the best players to come out of that 2nd-generation of vets who played a lot during Bolo's early Internet days of '94 or so (don't hold me to dates, that was a long damn time ago and I spent most of my time trying to drive my tank in a straight line). On a sad note, snip aka soup retired to go deal with his real life. Good luck buddy, we know you'll be back. :)

Rolodex clean-up. I finally got around to sorting through all the responses to my fall clean-up request for the Bolo Rolodex of player email addresses. I've finished the first pass through, cleaning out nearly 30 or so broken addresses. Among those lost forever (unless they see this or somebody else has their addresses) are: AlphaOmega, Bitch, Blitz, CowBoy, DH, drad, GP, Ixohoxi, USHER, and Yoda. I also corrected a handful of addresses, including those for BM, bleak, masher, Pretender, Fish, Deadsy, and palp. The new list now stands at 262 strong. I still have over 50 emails to sort through from people who were kind enough to submit player profiles, home page URLs, etc. All in good time. :)

• Bolo 0.99.7
• BoloSounds
• Bolo Buddy 1.1
• Maps (essential survival maps chosen by wharf rat: Chew Toy 3, Easter Island III, Hathec, Slugfest IV)
• READ ME! (a very short file describing what's in the package with links to the more complete Jolo Bolo Starter Pack)

This file is only served in the much smaller .sit format, again because vets should know how to handle that. I hope this is helpful to the few remaining vets out there. :) I ask that we try not to proliferate this too much since it does NOT contain any documentation from either Stu or anybody else. As such this is not really an official release.

	MAE AND ~g rec.games.bolo AND ~dc 1996/11/20

	~s Win95 AND ~g rec.games.bolo AND ~dc 1997/05/23

Clarification to previous clarification. Heh it just keeps getting more confusing. It turns out that the first person to actually play Bolo on another platform was Cliffa back in Nov 20, 1996, using advice he got from KevDog regarding an earlier version of MAE (his post from back then said v3.0 but I thought that was only just released recently?). He got a game going on a Sun SPARC running Solaris with Darth and Ulf on Macs, but it crashed after 10-15 minutes. Still, the Wright Brothers didn't exactly fly around the world on their first try either. In the meantime, Ulf is trying to be the first to run Bolo on HDTV. Good luck, pal. :)

Revisionist clarification. Ulfilas reminded me that he was actually the first reported player to successfully play Bolo on another platform in May '97 (not counting the BBC Micro on which Bolo was originally developed, of course). Ulfilas used Timbuktu, a screen-sharing application, to play Bolo while sitting in front of a Windows NT box with 3 other players on Macs. Unfortunately, the event was documented only by a screen shot from Wild Duck who was on 1 of the Macs, and that picture of course looks just like any other Bolo game. (The picture is lost now unless somebody else kept it?) That's why mecca's screen shot is historic, since it really shows Bolo on a UNIX/Windows environment. Anyway, do read all about Ulfilas's historic accomplishments and his later elaboration courtesy of Deja News, the poor man's public news server and an excellent way to dig up ancient posts.

Stuart finally dumped his venerable Quadra 700 and traded up to a 300 MHz 604e Mac and huge A/V monitor. I took some pictures which will get developed soon hopefully. Stuart is eager to start work with Apple - no grandiose plans, but he's got definite ideas about how he can help with their networking software. My impressions of Stuart are that he is a typical, just out of grad school computer geek - and I don't mean that in a bad way, I'm a geek too. He gets very excited about all sorts of technical stuff, and he's definitely got opinions on just about everything. He does get sidetracked pretty easily. We started to talk about the problem of Bolo not playing well on Macs without an L2 cache (such as older powerbooks) unless you dump BoloSounds, and 1.5 hours later we were still on the subject of Mac sound software! Pavani was really nice, only mildly alarmed at Yet Another Bolo Freak invading their house. Oh yeah and they have a new dog called Maxine who was happy to see me. All in all I was glad to meet He Who Makes Bolo finally.

New Year, New Bolo Buddy. Hey, it's the next best thing to a new Bolo itself. Kevin Whitty aka KevDog just released a major new version (1.1) of Bolo Buddy, his excellent utility for finding and joining Internet Bolo games. See the version changes for the full story, but in brief there is a totally new and more robust networking scheme, new features like a "friends" and recently joined IPs list, ability to selectively launch a particular copy of Bolo (if you have hacked/beta copies sitting around your disk), and many bug fixes. It is a little bigger in disk and RAM, but probably still well worth it for newbies and vets alike. Download the fat binary (PPC and 68K rolled into one) in the smaller .sit format to your Mac via WWW (faster) or FTP. You can also find the bigger .sit.hqx format and separate PPC/68K versions at the official Kagi Shareware site.

1997 || Jan-Mar | Apr-Sep | Oct-Dec 1998

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