Bolo News Recap: Jan-Mar 1998
Jolo
The original version of this document with many links may be found at:
http://deckard.mc.duke.edu/bolo/news/news_98a.html
The latest Bolo news is always at:
http://deckard.mc.duke.edu/bolo/news/
Jolo
* * *
This page is part of the Official Bolo Home Page (OBHP) and seeks to
cover the latest news and rumors for the Macintosh Internet tank game
Bolo. It will be updated whenever there is exciting news, so reload
often! If you would like to contribute any information on or off the
record, please contact me. --Jolo
Mar 27
Jolo bolo?!? Yes the rumors are true, I actually played a game, breaking
my 1-year Bolo abstinence since the Duke Bolofest (graphics intensive
link) of March '97. Berserkir and I lost to Athena and wharf rat after
over half an hour. I had trouble even driving in a straight line at
first and couldn't remember my key settings, but Berserkir put up with
me patiently and we all had a fun game. 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.
Mar 25
Bolo Buddy update Kevin Whitty aka KevDog just released Bolo Buddy 1.1.1
. You can now correctly join an IP address with an appended port number
such as lamer.foo.com:53. There are a few other minor fixes as well.
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.
Mar 16
Ranking Redux. Everybody talks about it, now Oscar Lindstein aka O is
doing something about it. He's set up a 1x1 game results table from
which he will make a monthly updated list of the top 10 Bolo players.
There are certain restrictions to ensure that only serious, currently
active players will be considered. The system is very subjective but
also makes a lot of sense. 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.
Mar 15
I'd like to thank the Academy... This site was selected as Heng-Cheong
Leong's An Apple A Day: Cool Apples site of the day on Friday the 13th.
That site showcases web pages about Apple and Macintosh, and web pages
created with Apple technologies. 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.
Mar 10
Send in the clones. "When will PC Bolo come out?" I get asked this at
least once a day, so I might as well update everybody. If you didn't
already, first read the AA section in the rec.games.bolo FAQ. Armoured
Alliance (AA) is a PC DOS tank game reverse engineered from Bolo to have
a different look but the same feel. It has been finished for a long
time, supporting local play via IPX and Internet play via KALI, but its
release has been held up for years due to a complicated and confusing
morass of copyright conflicts. AA's author Plastic Fist doesn't want to
give away the results of his hard work for free, and Bolo's author
Stuart Cheshire doesn't want others to make money from porting a game
that he invented, so the two of them are locked in a stalemate. The last
I heard, Stuart still intended to write his own PC Bolo so as to retain
full developer control. There have been rumors of Stuart's PC Bolo to
hit the market any day now, and of course if this were the case I wouldn
't be wasting my breath writing all this. As usual, Bolo vets have
learned to temper their expectations from Stuart, who is perennially
busy with his real life. The standing joke is that Bolo will be out by
X'mas (or xavmas) - which X'mas is unclear. 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.
Mar 2
Tracker woes. You may have noticed that the bolo.usu.edu tracker didn't
work today. Long story short, it blew up. Nix has since changed the
alias so that it now points at another machine, fizix.physics.usu.edu.
If you still can't reach bolo.usu.edu, it's because your domain name
server (DNS) system is a little confused and might take a day or two to
realize things have changed, then you should be able to use the
bolo.usu.edu alias as before. The recent checks and other features are
offline until further notice. 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.)
Feb 19
Meet your maker! I finally got the long anticipated pictures of Stuart
Cheshire, He Who Made Bolo, from my visit with him in early January (see
older news). I have 2 shots only: Stuart using his new Mac in the study
of his beautiful new home, and a picture of Jolo and Stuart together
(picture taken by his wife Pavani).
Feb 9
Most popular maps. I just updated the list of most popularly played maps
according to games registered to the usu tracker (which includes games
from the avara tracker since they communicate and synchronize with each
other). Note that all these maps may be found in the official Bolo FTP
archive's map section. In tournament maps, CT3 (in several different
spellings) and DHOR continue to dominate, with several Berserkir maps
following close behind. 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.
Feb 3
Somebunny on MAE. David "xav" Clancy set me straight on on who first
played Bolo on MAE - it turns out to be none other than Stu. If you pull
down the "About MAE" box you'll actually see xav's name in the credits,
since he was on the development team. It turns out that Brian Wilson, a
member of the original MAE team, was a Stanford grad school buddy of
Stu's. Way back in '93 or '94, he had Stu come over and make sure Bolo
worked on MAE before it was released. Since then with every new version,
they've made sure that Bolo still works on it. About a year later, xav
also helped with testing MAE Bolo. All of this predates the Euro
players' exploits reported here previously.
Jan 28
Happy Chinese New Year! It's the year of the tiger, which is appropriate
since I forgot to mention before that Giorgo Pappas aka Tiger was the
unofficial in-between rec.games.bolo FAQ maintainer between Cory Scott
aka Kimboho and myself. Tiger was the first to translate the FAQ into
HTML, heralding the new era of providing Bolo documentation on the WWW
which eventually led to the current rec.games.bolo FAQ at the OBHP.
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. :)
Jan 26
LGM/NewEuroBolo page. The new EuroBolo page has now merged with the
Little Green Man Bolo Page by Jesse and Joel Cox aka Jonny and MooseJaw.
This page serves as the home of the EuroBolo tournament now under way,
and is also trying to drum up support for a ladder-type ranking system
based on emailed 1x1 results. It's still pretty elementary and missing a
lot of important details, but it's a start. 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. :)
Jan 24
Minor updates to Brains Guide. After consulting with the respective
authors of aIndy and Hugh, I took the liberty to update their entries in
the Bolo Brains Guide. I updated aIndy's information to version 3.1 and
deleted a few sentences questioning whether or not Hugh actually worked.
Jan 21
Bolo Essentials Pack. In response to many veteran players who often
download Bolo to play on a cluster Mac temporarily, and hate to wait for
the bigass package to download and uncompress, I have created a "Bolo
Essentials" package available by WWW (faster) or FTP. This 548 kB .sit
file contains only: * 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.
Jan 19
Deja News. Ooops looks like Deja News doesn't keep unique identifiers
for news articles, so my links to old news articles don't work any more.
Try this search query instead for Cliffa's initial MAE game, or if that
dies too, you can always do your own "Power Search" with this phrase:
MAE AND ~g rec.games.bolo AND ~dc 1996/11/20 which means everything
containing MAE in the newsgroup rec.games.bolo created on that date.
Likewise try this search query for Ulfilas's Timbuktu game, and if that
fails, use: ~s Win95 AND ~g rec.games.bolo AND ~dc 1997/05/23
Jan 18
Kimboho! Cory Scott aka Kimboho came to Durham from Chicago to visit
another expat Wintermute. For those of you who don't know, Kimboho was
my predecessor as the maintainer of the rec.games.bolo FAQ. He was in
fact one of several old-timers instrumental in helping to convert
alt.games.bolo into the much more prestigious and more widely carried
rec.games.bolo. Anyway, Kimboho, Wmute, Pins, and Jolo went out to
dinner and yes, Jolo bought beers afterwards. (I have a standing offer
to buy drinks for any "name player" I meet who is of legal drinking
age.) 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. :)
Jan 16
Euro Bolo Page. Linus Dahlander aka "i n f e r n o" set up a Euro Bolo
Home Page to serve as a source of information for the upcoming Euro Bolo
Tournament. It's a little rough around the edges but it's improving
rapidly. 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.
Jan 10
Multi-platform Bolo. This may well be a historic screen shot - Bolo
being played on a Windows NT machine! Yes, believe it or not, it's Yet
Another PC Bolo. Chris Howard aka Mecca was playing with the latest MAE
3.0 (Macintosh Application Environment), a commercial MacOS emulator for
HPs and Suns. It essentially gives you an X window containing a 68LC040
running System 7.5.3 with full MacTCP. Chris managed to get Bolo working
with full UDP/IP networking on an HP workstation (very fast - the two of
us had only 175 ms roundtrip delay, no errors). He even tried using MAE
as an X server and sent the Bolo window over to his NT box, but that
didn't work well - lots of lag/errors and finally it crashed. So anyway,
if you have a nice UNIX workstation, check out the free 30 day demo of
MAE 3. This is the first-ever fully-functional emulator that actually
allows you to play network Bolo.
Jan 8
Off to see the Wizard... Well I did have the pleasure of meeting Stuart
in person on Jan 2, the day before returning from my California trip.
There isn't that much more Bolo-related news I can report beyond our
long phone call a few days before (see the previous news). I went to his
house, we went out to lunch, we came back to his house and talked for a
couple of hours about all sorts of stuff. It was either general friendly
conversation or secret stuff that I can't talk about anyway (just
kidding). Stuart does have one hell of a nice house right in San Jose
(which if you don't know is an outrageously expensive place to live due
to its proximity to Silicon Valley companies). Thanks to his wife
Pavani's job at Sun, they have a T1 connection right into their garage,
and the whole house is wired for networking. It's a beautiful house, for
those of you who care about such things - really spacious, nice open
layout, gorgeous hardwood floors. With a setup like that, I'd never
leave the house! 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 la ter 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.
Jan 1
Happy 1998! Be sure to catch the flurry of news at the end of '97 from
the previous column. I usually wait for a lull before switching to a new
column, but I figured a new year deserved a new page. :) 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.