[ Previous News from 1998 ]

Machome article. Carson Weitnauer aka edax reported that Bolo was mentioned prominently in the latest (Sept) issue of MacHome magazine. It reads:

Well, now that you know how to get a network game running, lets take a look at how the rest of us got here. In the beginning, there was Bolo. This masterpiece of shareware gained a cult following on college campuses around the U.S., thanks to the proliferation of Macintosh networks in the mid to late 80s. Bolo sparked dozens of add-ons and enhancements over the years, and to this day, thousands of maps (used to change the battlefield layout) can be found in a Yahoo search for "bolo." (MacHome, 9/1999, p. 54)

Bolo Haiku. If I were literary I'd do this in the form of a Haiku, but I'm not, so you'll have to check out the Mostly Official Bolo Haiku Contest Home Page instead. :)

WinBolo - not dead yet. I've heard from John Morrison, the author of WinBolo, a few times over the past few weeks. He's back at school now and has gradually resumed work on WinBolo. Nothing earth shattering to report yet, but at least he didn't get eaten by a shark or something.

It's alive! Maybe it's a freak summer post-ecliptic Friday the 13th thing, but there sure seem to be a lot of big games lately. Here is a picture of a game showing 11 of the 12 players all lined up and using their traditional nicknames (except for nix, who is pointed the wrong way), and here's the tracker output for the same game. Thanks to pins and MJMJ respectively for the pictures. That particular game didn't get played due to a modem lagger. We then restarted with a password and I actually fulfilled my annual 2-game quota. The 2nd game was particularly fun, with a protracted battle on Washington DC that also featured the first known stock quote in the middle of a game. (It's an inside joke - #bolo lately often seems more like a stock trading channel. :)

#bolo crackers? We're not quite sure why, but the crackers who defaced the Brookhaven National Lab home page yesterday acknowledged "#bolo". We've archived a copy of the defaced page - note there's some mildly offensive language. No, EFnet #bolo had nothing to do with it, as far as we know.

Hello. Well it's been nearly 10 months since I last posted here, so you know things have been quiet. To make a long story short, nothing much has changed. There still hasn't been a new Bolo since 1995, Stuart is not working on it as far as we know, yet a die-hard group of fans are still playing the game on both AppleTalk and the Internet.

New servers. No you don't need to change any URLs, with any luck you never will. Both the bolo home page and FTP archive moved in the past few months, but these changes were transparent to those of you who use the lgm.com domain hostnames. The web server was upgraded to a much faster Sun Ultra workstation that I own at Duke, and the FTP server moved from Ambrosia Software to my Mac also at Duke. Both servers will run indefinitely into the future. The links are still:

• Bolo Home Page: <http://www.lgm.com/bolo/>
• Bolo FTP Archive: <ftp://ftp.lgm.com/bolo/>
• Bolo Tracker: <http://tracker.lgm.com:50001 or <telnet://tracker.lgm.com:50000/>

Clone update. In case you missed it, there has been quite a flurry of activity pertaining to Bolo clones. No, there still isn't anything you can download or play yet, but at least there are multiple, viable projects that made it well past the typical first phase, where most clone projects in the past released something that barely drives around a map, then vanished into thin air after making grandiose promises on a web page. Even for Tank Assault and WinBolo, things have been pretty quiet the past few months, hopefully just the typical summer doldrums. The real test will be to see if any of the clone authors resume work in the fall.

Emulation. While most of the attention has shifted to clones lately, let's not forget that there are several potential ways to play Mac Bolo on a Windows machine using a MacOS emulator program. Here's a post from Chris Howard aka mecca regarding the latest option, Basilisk II, which seems to work quite well:

From: "Chris and Bonnie Howard" 
Newsgroups: rec.games.bolo
Subject: Bolo on the PC - The free solution
Date: Sat, 31 Jul 1999 23:47:06 -0500

Go to http://www.uni-mainz.de/~bauec002/B2Main.html and get Basilisk II.
I used the Win32 version.  Use a copy of your old mac II roms.  Find
you old system 7.5.5 cd.  Have fun.  It works great.  Just ask Nix ....
he joined my game earlier today.

Hint: http://only.at/emaculation

Cheers,
mecca

A few days later, he amended his post with the following suggestion:

Use the 0.70 version of the Win32 Basilisk for Bolo.  Version 0.89 and
version 0.90 have problems.  I'm still trying to get the linux version
to work.

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