rec.games.bolo in the 90s

[Ragugaki]

Dear All, this is "Nambo" who used to play bolo on the Auckland Uni
campus (New Zealand) back in the mid 1990s. Stuart Cheshire created a
game that had groups of us using up bandwidth until we were kicked out
at the end of the night. We played on the Mac LC IIs in the Human Bio
building against the guys in the Med School up the road. There were
guys in the Maths (comp) lab, Physics lab and even a few over in the
Law School. Using a simple program, I was able to generate a map of
our University and we played on that a few times. The old faithful map
was Everard Island that the author Stuart Cheshire included as part of
the game. Unforunately the firewall prevented us from escaping into
the outside world and we soon stopped playing when we graduated and
had to earn a living. Truth is - Bolo was a fully diverse game and
actually got us all communicating, something special. There were even
"brains" that I learned how to program in C++ and mine was called
"Nambot" - even sent him overseas to the USA for a critique. Nambot
was not bad but had trouble remembering which bases he owned and which
had been taken over - but he could hold his own in a fight and loved
to lay mines when running away! Hope you guys can share your
experience.

[Robert Uhl]

I discovered Bolo by accident when I was a kid. I'd been downloading
freeware and shareware from sumex-aim when I saw a 'map generator.' I'm
interested in map generation, so I ftped it, dropped it on a floppy and
took it home, used Apple's DOS-to-Mac converter, de-BinHexed it and
discovered a program which generator 'Bolo' maps, whatever they were.

The next day, I downloaded Bolo and history was made. I loved that
game! Once when my folks were out of town my best friend and I played
Bolo for a week, almost 24 hours a day. Happy days!

--
Robert A. Uhl

[qartl]

Robert Uhl <eadm...@NOSPAMgmail.com> wrote:

What was really bad for Bolo was the infamous SQ hackbot Bolo brain
that let people cheat in any game. It exploited a bug in the Classic
Mac OS user interface code which bypassed the "No bots allowed"
checkbox if you launched Bolo by double-clicking the brain file. This
was about 2003 IIRC. Of course, games were being recorded and replayed
in BoloViewer by that time, so it was easy to identify the cheaters.
But it made the game experience so unpleasant that more than a few
regulars quit.