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

Bolofest in progress. A peculiar gathering of Bolo vets is taking place this weekend somewhere in rural Illinois, hosted by the Evil Twins of Bolo, vert and palp. Slymouse came from Michigan, Pins flew in from North Carolina, and Squelcher had the shortest trip from Chicago. The people involved would normally make this a classic Chicago Bolofest, but between all of them they only managed to come up with one Mac, so it's more of a social get-together than anything else.

Mr. and Mrs. goob. Congratulations to Sam Huffman aka goob who got married last week (without telling many of us, I might add). They are now on their honeymoon at some undisclosed location.

Network PC Bolo via Fusion! This is a historic day! It's finally possible for PC users to play real Mac Bolo on the net, without the typical kludge of multiple emulators and go-between machines which we have mentioned before (such as on May 29 below). We previously (July 6 below) reported on Microcode Solutions' Mac emulator for PCs Fusion which allowed you to play standalone Bolo on a PC. Now a new version has been released which allows network play using a PPP modem connection! (Theoretically you should be able to get TCP/IP by using the SCSI emulation to access a SCSI ethernet adaptor?)

Mecca played the first directly emulated Mac Bolo game on a PC early this morning in a game with wharf rat. The round trip delay was in the 200's, with Mecca on modem and wharf rat on direct ethernet. Mecca said that his AMD k6 233 was very responsive and playable, more so even than his Mac IIci which he bought just for Bolo. Fusion is $79.95 commercialware with a free demo, and you must have access to a real Mac's ROM image. It ain't free, but then again neither is buying a Mac just to play Bolo, or buying a decent PC game for that matter.

Return of Hillbilly Bob. A Bolo legend and not just in his own mind, we're glad to report that HB is back and playing again from his Mindspring account. Berserkir contributed this snapshot of a tracker output.

Wall-in Mania. Berserkir apparently has been playing a lot lately. :) He also contributed this self-explanatory picture of the remnants of a 4x4 game, an increasingly rare scenario outside of the occasional Bolofests.

Bolofest recap. Sorry it took me a few days to recover from last weekend's Duke Bolofest. SBCM did come down from Chicago as promised. He and pins came over to my lab at 1:30 pm on Saturday. Since it was just the 3 of us, we decided to stay in the lab and play on the older Macs instead of opting for newer Macs in a public cluster somewhere else on campus. This way we could use colorful metaphors at will, and did we ever! We played for a while and then pins left briefly to pick up Steve, a friend who had never played before. We found a few partners online to round out the possy: nix, palp, and DirkDiggler aka ¥. The games were quite unlike the usual bolofest, with guest of honor SBCM intentionally picking his own old, obscure maps such as Stupidfest VIII and Better Best Map Ever, and the sluggo/nix creation Little Barber Shop of Horrors 2. I actually had fun on SBCM's infamously frustrating maps. It turns out he really put some wicked thought into each map, and if you think about it (or if SBCM yells strategic hints at you from across the room) you can really do interesting things. SBCM did a lot of yelling, including nearly 90 minutes of continous complaining about the autoscroll. I just ignored him, figuring he was a washed-up old vet still stuck in a pre-autoscroll mindset, but later it turns out he had misconfigured his key setup such that his drive keys were the same as scrolling or something wacky like that. Although nix, palp, and ¥ may disagree, the games were quite fun and lagfree (once we decided to go to all passworded games to keep out a persistent modemer). At the end of the afternoon, we played a few Tix Tox Pillboxes to round it all out. We then retired to the James Joyce Pub in downtown Durham, where I bought many a pint as per Bolofest tradition. We had a great time, aided in no small part by a certain Irish waitress whom we all took turns drooling over. We finally called it a day at about 10 pm or so, left an obscene tip for the waitress, and went home to nurse our throbbing heads.

SBCM attack! Mothers hide your daughters, the infamous Russ Mast aka Steamboatcaptainman is coming to North Carolina. We'll be doing some of the usual B&B on Saturday the 18th, look for pins on IRC to let him know if you're interested in partaking. There may also be some other events the following weekend on the 26th.

USA wins soccer! Our own Will Uther of Bolo brains fame was at the heart of the RoboCup '98 Carnegie Mellon University USA team which brought home the gold. The objective is to play soccer with teams of fully autonomous robot dogs. The robot hardware is fixed, so you win by programming it with superior strategic software. There is an earlier article just before the cup, with a picture of Will. For interesting movies of an earlier generation of robot dogs in action, visit the Sony site (it's all Japanese, just look for the movie links at the end in a group of 5).

Bolo Multi-media Website. Many of you know CoolFool from his frequent playing and his amusing movies where he exploits Bolo bugs and features to do weird and interesting things. CoolFool has now set up his own Bolo Multi-media Website (BMW) which has movies (of course), pictures, literature, and maps. He also welcomes contributions of any of those. Check it out, but be sure to use a relatively new browser since it is chock full of multimedia.

Palp's Bolo Maps. One of the most interesting and prolific map makers (including the Skew Toy, Gothic, and Dream Soda series among many others) is back at what he does best. Palp reorganized his Bolo map page so that his maps are now grouped by category such as slower, faster, bigger, etc. He also added a few new gems. The site is visually clean and easy to navigate, which you would expect from the only webmaster who is more compulsive than I am. :)

Fusion Mac emulator. Microcode Solutions' Mac emulator for PCs Fusion is finally out, $79.95 commercialware with a free demo. This may be of interest to our PC brethren who keep whining about wanting PC Bolo, but before you wet yourselves, please note that this initial version does not have network support. In other words, you cannot play Bolo against other people. You may find the Macintouch write-up interesting.

Stanford Bolofest. Speaking of Ulfilas, he's coming to America. He'll be in the Bay Area during the July 4th weekend and is trying to stir up interest in a fest. If you're local to that area, contact either him or one of the regulars there.

Gnolo update. I just heard from Barath Raghavan, who is the point man for the guys trying to write "GNU Bolo" for a high school programming project. I never expected they or any other amateur group would turn out a fully functioning Bolo, but I've tried to support their efforts because I'm an educator, after all. :) Their school year just ended and here's how the project concluded. It's hardly Bolo, but hopefully they had fun and learned a lot in the process.

What we presented was a little ship thing that could move, turn, shoot, and would move on a background that would scroll as the ship moved and it also had a few other minor things I can't remember...but no networking - I had networking working in our text based version under linux, but I couldn't get it going in win95 in time for our presentation. The engine I wrote I think was okay, not bad, but the front end really didn't use the engine as much I would have liked - guess it means it's time to get back to work (or course, when I get back home :P )

Bolofest correction. I knew it. Ulfilas now plays from Switzerland where he is a postdoc at Zurich University, not Germany. The 'fest ended at 5:30 am his local time, talk about dedication!

Jolo actually works. I'm sorry for the long hiatus. I've actually had to get work done with the addition of my first 2 students. Nothing really earth-shattering happened anyway. Rumors of Bolo 0.99.9 are all to blamed on goob.

Festival Del Bolo. After much discussion, it finally happened on Tuesday, June 9. Jolo, Pins, Flag, and Lefty (an old timer who retired many years ago) got together at Satisfaction's Bar and Restaurant in downtown Durham, NC. After much greasy foods and golden beverages, we caravaned to Duke and met up with Max. The 5 of us got into 1 of the public Mac clusters in the main library, equipped with several dozen 7200/90's with 17" monitors. It was already 10 pm by the time we got Bolo set up and configured on our respective Macs, so unfortunately we weren't able to play for very long since many of us had to work early the next morning. We played 3 or 4 games, first 2x3 amongst ourselves, then with a few low-lag vets from outside Duke including sluggo from UCLA, Severian from Michigan, and Ulfilas from Germany(!). The last game was the best, a 3x3 with Jolo, Severian, and sluggo withstanding an onslaught by Max, Flag, and Ulfilas. For those of you who don't know, aside from me, the other 5 guys in that list are all top-level players with some 30 years of combined Bolo experience! The game see-sawed quite a bit, and I was just psyched to be observing my partners doing incredible things. It's a privilege to lose with you gentlemen, even if I was the major reason for that loss. :) We wrapped things up at about 11:30 pm, just when we were really getting into it. Everybody agreed we should do it again really soon, tentatively in July? Pictures will follow soon too.

Ride of the Valkyries. Andrew Welch aka Berserkir submitted this screen capture of him and Jess O'Leary aka mofo doing the old but always amusing trick of lgm waterskiing. To do this, you take off from land as your lgm is just behind you, and keep going at full speed or else he catches up to you in the water. A little later, mofo managed to add a new twist to his waterskiing skills and demonstrates how to pick up and dump your lgm in this 672K movie.

Rolodex hits 300! Greg Winkler aka Triops has the dubious honor of being the 300th entry in the Bolo Rolodex email registry. This is not a mailing list (there is no Bolo mailing list) nor the way to set up games (that's what the tracker is for - see the short FAQ), but simply a reference so that Bolo players can find each other more readily.

PC/Amiga Bolo? Chris Howard aka mecca is up to his tricks again. He was determined to get real, network-capable Mac Bolo running on his PC. As we all know by know, Executor is the main Mac emulator but it doesn't have serial or networking support. So Chris got creative:

1. He ran UAE (Amiga emulator for PC) on Windows98
2. He ran ShapeShifter (Mac emulator for Amiga) on top of UAE
3. He ran Bolo on top of ShapeShifter

After many hours of configurations, he managed to get his AMD K6/233 to act like a Mac, running about twice as fast the old Mac IIci which he bought just to play Bolo with. The result is a fully Mac-compatible, networked Bolo running on a PC. The only problem is, while every other Mac application ran lightning fast, Bolo ran in slow motion. He suspects Stu was using the video hardware as the timer or something. At last check, Chris was still tweaking things to try to fix that.

"One of the first non-text based, Internet playable games is still one of the best. This is a strategy tank game that can be played over and over again. It's easy to learn but can take forever to master."

According to a download.com page, Dongleware Software released Bolo 1.0.6 for Macs and PCs on 12/1/97. Here is their description:

"Bolo is a tank strategy game that calls to mind home console arcade systems of the early 80's. Features include decent graphics, an original music score, and sound effects. This demo version of Bolo supports only mono sound effects. Version 1.0.6 contains unspecified changes."

When KevDog downloaded and tried it, he said, "It has nothing to do with tanks or networking. It looks like a children's game with ghosts and levels and such. They seem pretty proud of their music, too." Here is Dongleware's description from the "other" Official Bolo Home Page:

"Bolo is a state-of-the-art redesign of the classic Atari game by the same name. A high resolution fantasy action adventure combining wonderful cartoon illustrations by Pascal, dreamy music by Nik Tyndall and the unique game play of Oxyd designer Meinolf Schneider."

What happened was that some time last year or so, Dongleware started making a new game called Bolo, named after an old Atari game. This has nothing to do with our Bolo. I remember downloading a beta myself and giving up after it crashed my Mac repeatedly and caused disk errors. Looks like the people at download.com got confused with 2 separate submissions and merged our Bolo with theirs. Oh well.

Mrs. and Mrs. MHz. Just a quick note to congratulate Kevin Girard aka MHz who just returned from his honeymoon. MHz has been playing for years and, among his many accomplishments, was a co-organizer of the now cancelled Internet Bolo League and maintained a Bolo strategy mailing list.

If you haven't been back lately, there's a lot of new stuff. About a month ago she undertook the task of a peer ranking of players, where she solicited rankings from 18 players and churned it all into a classic 5-tier ranking system. Also be sure to check out her screen shots, chronology of players and the game itself, her own journal of Bolo thoughts intended for newbies, and last but not least, some interesting pictures.

TA update. It seems I spoke too soon. MW delivers on his first major goal: to get the tank driving around on a map. This is also the first time that a public screen capture is available. See TA: First Glimpse (no, not that sort of TA) which I've put up in the Tank Assault site.

vert walled in. Yes you read that right. Chris Hwang aka vert is best known for his ability to humiliate newbies and vets alike in a scathing 1x1 game, then add insult to injury by walling you in, often with humorous results such as when he provided one victim with a pool or when he was inspired by the famous Absolut ads. Well, it appears that Sam Huffman aka goob managed to turn the tables on vert. He had lost a game and was in imminent danger of being walled in himself, but vert didn't realize he was carrying a tree, which goob used to wall them both in (vert is "meddler").

FileDudes. Bolo has been selected for inclusion by the FileDudes people, who promote internet programs for many operating systems. Again I'm not big on advertising all the silly awards and recognitions, but since news is slow anyway... :)

IE needs somebunny to love. The elusive David Clancy aka xav aka somebunny has been spotted playing again. Even more shocking, our former Man in Cupertino is apparently now working for Microsoft on Internet Explorer! Apparently all but one of the Mac IE development team are ex-Apple employees.

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

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