Slashdot Mirror

Yes, I know Stuart. However, as great as his contributions to networking have been, Bolo still tops the list.

I don't recall XPilot or Bolo doing that, but didn't XFire do something similar?

I spent many an hour back in the 80's beating up on lamers at Michigan and Stanford.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolo_(computer_game)
http://www.lgm.com/bolo/intro/

One of the best tricks I ever came up with was building my own HyperCard stack to launch whatever program I wanted, after discovering a pretty big bug in the school's "security" software. Our Mac labs had At Ease, and it would only have just a few "educational" programs etc. available to students. However, I found a really big vulnerability - you could take any program and simply change the creator code with ResEdit to match that of any one of the "allowed" programs, and it would then be allowed to run.

So I'd take some various "tools" from the web (At Ease password cracking type stuff, mostly, and of course a copy of Bolo to play with friends over the LAN while we snuck in during lunch), change the creator codes to match SimpleText or Math Blaster or whatever, and build a HyperCard stack that would launch the programs for me.

It got to the point where I was making "Bolo disks" (for all my friends) which included a copy of the game, some extra maps and a HyperCard launcher stack. I got a reputation as a bigtime hacker among everyone in the school (and I was 11 years old!), which was both good and bad - tons of awesome extracurricular stuff related to computers, but always seen with an eye of caution...

http://www.lgm.com/bolo/
http://www.winbolo.com/

There was a clone called Winbolo that some guy wrote, but it doesn't work properly in linux and doesn't seem to be under development. If only there were an open source version of it, we could revive it.

It's amazing how long this little game has endured, largely due to the balance of its arcade and strategic bits. It's also proof that a lot can be done with some 4 -bit graphics and lo-fi sound.

Bolo, from about 1987. Of course, the Bolo-playing population is vanishingly small, but it does live on today. I'm sure somebody else will come along with more examples shortly, but people playing eight-year-old network games isn't that remarkable.

The multiplayer deathmatch credit bothers me. I know Doom was really popular, and I don't argue that it advanced the industry, and I can see where we might have fled to dedicated gaming hardware if not for some amazing game like Doom. But really... we were all doing multiplayer deathmatch in text mode with nSnipes shortly after the first networks were born. And Macs were running Bolo before Doom was ever around.

bolo.

and with your dual G5, you can play against 15 bots running in the background!

http://www.lgm.com/winbolo (download link for windows and linux versions here)

http://winbolo.net (real-time logs of current games, current game list, and several forums)

http://winbolo.us (contains a good variety of winbolo links)

http://www.fi.winbolo.us/ (contains a good variety of content of various winbolo topics including winbolo netiquette)

I have been around in the winbolo community since it's release almost three years ago (Christmas 2000). In my opinion, it is a decent clone and will provide what the poster is looking for.

However, having played mac bolo on the internet during the late 90s, in more competitive game with experienced players, there are some definite differences in game play in winbolo compared to the original. If you played the original once in a while in a computer lab and are looking for some nostalgia, winbolo is great. The "hardcore" mac bolo players however will notice some differences once they get back into it. (http://www.lgm.com/winbolo/goodclone.html for some more info)

http://www.lgm.com/winbolo (download link for windows and linux versions here)

http://winbolo.net (real-time logs of current games, current game list, and several forums)

http://winbolo.us (contains a good variety of winbolo links)

http://www.fi.winbolo.us/ (contains a good variety of content of various winbolo topics including winbolo netiquette)

I have been around in the winbolo community since it's release almost three years ago (Christmas 2000). In my opinion, it is a decent clone and will provide what the poster is looking for.

However, having played mac bolo on the internet during the late 90s, in more competitive game with experienced players, there are some definite differences in game play in winbolo compared to the original. If you played the original once in a while in a computer lab and are looking for some nostalgia, winbolo is great. The "hardcore" mac bolo players however will notice some differences once they get back into it. (http://www.lgm.com/winbolo/goodclone.html for some more info)

Does anybody remember Avara? If I remember correctly, the README for Avara initially (and brazenly) touted itself as "The game that would soon supplant Bolo as the defacto standard for gaming on campus and corporate networks. " Then after a little while, the newer README began touting itself as the game that DID replace Bolo as the standard for gaming on corporate and campus networks.

That was certainly the case as far as my very good newly departed friend and I were concerned. After slaving away at Microwarehouse Tech all day, we'd race home to our beach apartments and battle it out via our little LAN. After playing Avara over 14.4 dial-up you reeeeaaaalllly appreaciated the convenience of having ethernet dangling out your window to your neighbor's apartment! (not long before., we were using phone-net!)

My upstairs neighbor (at that same beach apartment) created a pretty brilliant plug-in for Escape Velocity, turning all of the ships into Star Wars ships (painstakingly rendered in Infini-D!!!). EV was a great game too, I've personally killed many hours (and brain cells!!!) playing my friend Mark's SW plug-in!

That game was lots of fun..

http://www.lgm.com/bolo/intro/

Thet's one heck of a game of bolo!

Actually it all started with games.

Specifically a Mac game named Bolo based on a serverless ring topology and written by a fellow named Stuart Cheshire. He also happens to be a "Wizard without Portfolio" at Apple and the Co-chairman of the IETF Zeroconf Working Group.

You can still play it. Watch out - it can get pretty addicting.

Bolo still rules, even after all these years. I play Everquest, Unreal Tournament, etc. -- but Bolo feels the most like a "sport".

Here's the Bolo Homepage

I haven't played this game, but it reminds me of the insanity that came out of Bolo freshman year. hordes of people descending on the Mac lab to team up and beat the crap out of each other in little tanks.

wow that was fun.

OK, so most Linux people don't like the fact that winmodems are closed devices that are not supported on Linux. The conventional wisdom complains that existing winmodems give poor performance and kill the CPU. However in a recent /. post no less a personage than John Carmack suggested that winmodems could be implemented in a way that is better than conventional modems for the needs of interactive games.

In the process of doing a web search I then turned up Stuart Cheshire's old home page. For those who don't know who he is, well before the web was popular he wrote a classic networked Mac game called bolo. (In fact when the web became popular the bolo players used to curse that the web was dragging the internet down too much...) Most links to it are dead, but the official home page is still up although there has not been a release since 1995. (This was apparently done as research into the needs of interactive networked programs. Gee, all of those hours that I spent as a test subject without knowing it...)

With Stuart's credentials established, it is well worth looking at his rants. In particular his latency rant, which was expanded out into a white paper.

Once you are through reading those you will see that for anything interactive, particularly games, what really matters is latency, not bandwidth. And modems are a major source of this latency. In addition he and John Carmack agree that software modems (AKA winmodems) can be (though they are not currently) programmed to operate in a mode that reduces latency, and the result would be better for interactive games than conventional modems.

So, are winmodems just a bad idea, or are they just poorly implemented? Conventional wisdom says that they are bad no matter what. But the people who should know best suggest otherwise.

-snellac

OK, so most Linux people don't like the fact that winmodems are closed devices that are not supported on Linux. The conventional wisdom complains that existing winmodems give poor performance and kill the CPU. However in a recent /. post no less a personage than John Carmack suggested that winmodems could be implemented in a way that is better than conventional modems for the needs of interactive games.

In the process of doing a web search I then turned up Stuart Cheshire's old home page. For those who don't know who he is, well before the web was popular he wrote a classic networked Mac game called bolo. (In fact when the web became popular the bolo players used to curse that the web was dragging the internet down too much...) Most links to it are dead, but the official home page is still up although there has not been a release since 1995. (This was apparently done as research into the needs of interactive networked programs. Gee, all of those hours that I spent as a test subject without knowing it...)

With Stuart's credentials established, it is well worth looking at his rants. In particular his latency rant, which was expanded out into a white paper.

Once you are through reading those you will see that for anything interactive, particularly games, what really matters is latency, not bandwidth. And modems are a major source of this latency. In addition he and John Carmack agree that software modems (AKA winmodems) can be (though they are not currently) programmed to operate in a mode that reduces latency, and the result would be better for interactive games than conventional modems.

So, are winmodems just a bad idea, or are they just poorly implemented? Conventional wisdom says that they are bad no matter what. But the people who should know best suggest otherwise.

-snellac

Your arguments are good, but they are not arguments against video games in general. They are arguments against the video games you have played, or at least against only the particular ones you are talking about.

The fact of games not being sufficiently similar to real life are completely bogus. Nobody complains that chess doesn't give you the full experience of the sights, sounds, and smells of the medieval european battlefield. It doesn't have to.

Maybe you should try Terminus, where there are no cheat codes, and an unintentional, living experiment in organized anarchy is taking place on the main popular server. Or you should try Bolo, which also has no cheat codes and will teach you that situations that look simple can become amazingly complicated. Oh yeah, it'll also teach you teamwork and the importance of communication. Not to mention that it's a big barrel of fun. (Please note that both of these are multiplayer; this is no coincidence!)

So, to recap, 1, 2, and 3 are wrong points. They apply only to a limited subset of games. Many good games, in particular multiplayer games, and especially multiplayer games that involve more than point-and-shoot, avoid all of these problems. 4 is totally irrelevant, since if it were important, nobody should ever read a book, listen to music off a tape or CD, or play-fight.

Oh shit.

Oh Shit oh shit oh shit.

I wasted many night time hours when I should have been sleeping blowing up pillboxes and trying to wipe out opponents on the available Macs. And now, I discover that not only is the WinBolo (not much use there) but there is also LinBolo! I know what I'll be compiling this evening... Waaa! There goes my sleeping hours again! :-)

Cheers,

Toby Haynes

Actually, I was surprised about a year ago to learn that many have actually made the jump to 'cyberspace' if you will, and now use telnet instead of a direct dialup. Yay, no more murderous long distance to play the best boards. A really good board I've played in recently was twgs.tradewars.org. Be careful, nearly everyone there was as old of a player as I am, and quite a bit better.

I'd like to say that TW2002 is probably the most enjoyable game I've ever played. Close seconds would go to BRE and Legend of the Red Dragon. Of course WinBolo is probably the best graphical internet game, but thats different.

Daniel