Bolo is a networked graphical real-time multi-player tank battle game. It has elements of arcade-style shoot-em-up action, but for the serious players who play 12 hour games with 16 players working in teams in different networked computer clusters around an office or university campus, it becomes more of a strategy game. You have to play it to understand.
Licensing agreement
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bolo is "Shareware" for non-commercial use. That means that you can try it out before you decide whether you are going to delete it from your disk, or keep it and pay for it. You can also give copies to your friends, but you mustn't charge them money for it. Bolo may not be distributed commercially or bundled with any commercial product without the written permission of the author, Stuart Cheshire.
See "ReadMe.Shareware" for more details.
What you should have received in this package
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
You should have received the Bolo application program "Bolo 0.99.6", the sound effect file "BoloSounds", and the "Brains" folder, containing "Standard Autopilot". As well as the introductory "README FIRST" file, you should also have received the following documentation files in the "More information" folder:
MacBolo Instructions (MSWD) -- Instructions how to play Bolo
1. Bolo.README -- this file
2. Bolo.GeneralFAQ -- answers to frequently asked questions about playing Bolo
3. Bolo.NetworkingFAQ -- answers to frequently asked questions about networking Bolo
4. Bolo.Maps&BrainsFAQ -- hints for people designing Maps and Brains
5. Bolo.VersionHistory -- news about what is new in this release of Bolo
6. Bolo.FuturePlans -- news about what to expect next
Bug Report Form -- The information I want to know if Bolo crashes
ReadMe for Mac Plus -- Notes for Mac Plus owners
ReadMe.Shareware -- pricing information
rec.games.bolo FAQ -- The FAQ file from the rec.games.bolo internet news group.
Sample Code folder, containing information about Networking, Map files and Brains.
If any of these are missing, you can obtain the full Bolo package by Gopher (or by anonymous ftp) from Sumex-Aim.Stanford.EDU, or at certain times of day, if you are lucky, from Bolo.Stanford.EDU.
The manual is in Microsoft Word format (Word 4 or 5). Sorry if you don't have Word. I intended to convert it to some other format, but didn't find the time.
The latest up to date information and gossip about Bolo can be found on the internet news group called "rec.games.bolo".
For other information check out the rec.games.bolo FAQ, included in this package, or visit the World Wide Web site "http://bolo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/".
It's also a good idea (as with all Internet software) to check your usual anonymous ftp sites to make sure that you have the latest version of this program.
How to contact me
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My World Wide Web Page is: http://ResComp.Stanford.EDU/~cheshire/bio.html
I will warn you that I get swamped with e-mail, so it's not humanly possible for me to write detailed answers for every one (well, you do want me to find time to work on Bolo, don't you?) but if you need to contact me about something important, you can use one of the following methods:
• My Internet e-mail address is: cheshire@cs.stanford.edu
• On America Online, Bitnet, BIX, eWorld, GEnie and Prodigy you can send mail directly to internet addresses.
• On AppleLink send to: cheshire@cs.stanford.edu@internet#
• On CompuServe send to: INTERNET:cheshire@cs.stanford.edu
• AT&T Mail send to: internet!cs.stanford.edu!cheshire
• On Fidonet send to: cheshire@cs.stanford.edu ON 1:1/31
• On programs using Novell's MHS (eg. Coordinator) use: mail@cserve{INTERNET:cheshire@cs.stanford.edu}
(Kudos to CompuServe here for providing a forwarding service for other systems which can't do it themselves.)
• On MCI Mail you have to type "EMS" at the "To:" prompt, then type "INTERNET" at the "EMS" prompt, then finally type "cheshire@cs.stanford.edu" at the "Mbx:" prompt.
(If you have any more to add to the list, or corrections to these, please let me know.)
Notes
~~~~~
If you want sound effects, put the BoloSounds file in the same folder as the Bolo application icon. If you want to save disk space, you can chuck the BoloSounds file and Bolo will still work. If you do this, you can also reduce Bolo's memory allocation to about 1000K instead of 1500K. If you don't want colour either, you can reduce the memory to about 700K.
The game benefits hugely from colour. Even if you play it on a black-and white Mac, try to get a look at it on a colour Mac first, and it should help make it more obvious what the various visual elements on the screen represent.
Bolo was written entirely using Think C 5, ResEdit, and Max Lyth's excellent Think C utility "CMaster". (See below for more details.)
Bolo is NOT Object Oriented.
Bolo does NOT use RPC, or lightweight threads, or the OSI seven layer model, or any other currently fashionable 'magic bullet' technology.
Bolo is written in standard plain ANSI C, with a little in line assembler.
The recent "object oriented" hype is largely an attempt by the Unix workstation companies (and other software companies) to have us believe that the reason all their software is crap is because they were all using the wrong language, and everything will be better next time. We'll see. Basically, there are clever programmers, and there are stupid programmers. C++ is a good language, and I use it myself sometimes, but if you can't write a working program to save your life (or your company) then C++ is not going to magically fix it for you. A team of stupid programmers is still a team of stupid programmers, and giving them C++ to use just gives them more interesting and varied ways to get it wrong. Be especially wary of companies whose marketing hype has the phrase "object oriented all the way down to the bits" in it. The only place left to go after that is "object oriented all the way down to the electrons" (presumably you would send a message to each electron saying "spin yourself"?)
Bolo runs with 24 or 32 bit addressing, with System 6 or System 7, with or without virtual memory, with single or multiple screens, small or large, from one bit monochrome to 36 bit colour, direct mapped or indexed. It runs on every model of Macintosh from the Mac Plus upwards, including PowerBooks, Duos, Quadras, PowerMacs and even the IIFX. It runs on Apple Unix (A/UX), on Sun Workstations (using the Liken Macintosh Emulator), on NeXT Workstations (using Executor), and on the PowerPC (using Apple's own 68K emulation). I'm told it does NOT work very well on Apple's own Macintosh Application Environment (MAE) for Sun and HP Workstations, but I haven't had time yet to investigate why.
(Note: On some emulators screen update performance may be better if you select "QuickDraw Only" from the "Bolo" menu. Also, to run MAE succesfully, you will need a very fast Sun or HP workstation, and you should "renice" the MAE process to the highest priority to give Bolo good network response time.)
Bolo prefers, but does not require, System 7. For the sake of Mac Plus users I will continue to support Bolo running on 6.0.7 (but not if you are using MacroMaker -- that's not my fault).
If you have an Apple 8•24 GC graphics card and have 'acceleration' turned on, then Bolo will work, but it will run slowly. You may wish to turn 'acceleration' off.
After Dark has a feature called the SystemIQ (TM) activity monitor, which will detect that the Mac is 'busy' (playing Bolo all night) and decide not go to sleep so that it does not 'interfere' with the 'busy' application. If this is not what you want, then turn off 'SystemIQ'. Bolo will not be in the least affected, or slowed down, by having a screen saver run over the top of it.
Plea!
~~~~
There are often flame wars between Bolo players and fans of other games on rec.games.bolo and other discussion forums. If you want to show your support for Bolo, instead of descending to petty name-calling, write something interesting about Bolo, put it on a Web server, and get it listed in Yahoo and the other Web directories. Why put a lot of effort into elloquent arguments in news group postings, when they will be aged off the news server a few days later and lost for all time? Give your beautiful prose longevity by putting it on a Web server.
See the "FAQ" files for frequently asked questions about Bolo.
See the file "Bolo.versionhistory" for details of what's new in this release of Bolo.
Credits
~~~~~~
• Original game concept: James Everard and Stuart Cheshire
• Programming: Stuart Cheshire
• Map and graphics character design (original BBC micro version): James Everard
• Sound effects and Sound Manager expertise: Kevin Marks and Maf Vosburgh
• Voice of little green man: Maf Vosburgh
• Bolo file icons: Matt Rollefson
• Invaluable help diagnosing and debugging network glitches: Neil Crellin
• Sample code to help me see how to handle multiple monitors: Steve Newman
• New colour scheme for graphics on Macintosh: Pavani Diwanji
• Miscellaneous encouragement and advice about VBL tasks: Bernhard Wieser
• Help with AppleTalk Phase 1 details not documented in Inside Mac: David Gelhar
• Writing the ace Macintosh FTP server that allows me to distribute Bolo: Peter Lewis
• Major stress testing and bug reporting for low-end Macs (Plus & SE): David Hsu and Brian Quirion (aka antz aka Jondolar)
• Immeasurable help in spreading the word at Apple and getting Bolo stress tested on Quadras and under A/UX and on large AppleTalk networks and lots of other things: Brian Wilson.
• Help with After Dark problems, KeyTrans question, etc. Ben Haller
• Thanks to Brad Morris and Ammon Skidmore for advice about how to do movable modal dialogs.
• Thanks to Carl Osterwald for code to do map preview in the open file dialog.
• Thanks to Thomas Fruin of the Nido de Aguilas International School in Chile for sending me the ARA developer notes so I can find out how to make Bolo work over ARA (although I haven't had time to do it yet).
• Thanks to Tom Gooding for displaying an amazing application of the scientific method (i.e. patient experimentation) in noticing an arithmetic bug in Bolo 0.99.2 that made the tank's top speed when going leftwards only 31/32 of what it was when going rightwards.
• Thanks to James Frazier for setting up the original Bolo Home Page, and thanks to Chris Hwang and Caine Schneider for giving the page a new home at http://bolo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ and continuing to improve it.
• Thanks to Alexsander Totic for adding support for the "bolo:" URL to Netscape.
• Thanks the Brent Pease for his energetic support of Bolo.
• Special mention for good ideas regarding network error recovery: Kevin Marks
• Special mention for really evil way of killing a pillbox: Dane Spearing
• Special mention for managing to win against six opponents despite total inability to ever shoot at an enemy tank and hit it: Tom Costello
• Largest Bolo game during commercial air flight: Steve Green (and five friends). (Don't do this again. If a Sony CD player can bring down a commercial aeroplane, I hate to think what 50 feet of unshielded LocalTalk cable would do to its electronics!)
• Testing and encouragement: Dane Spearing, Mark Visokay, Tom Costello, Bob McDaniel, Jeremy Doig, Matt Rollefson, Michele Carvalho, and anyone else whom I may have forgotten; let me know so I can add your name to the list.
Acknowledgments
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
When people ask me why I made Bolo the way it is, two board games come to mind which I think served as inspiration for some of the concepts I have tried to include in Bolo.
1. "Combat"
Devised by G. Rostant, for J. & L. Randall Ltd, Potters Bar, Herts, England, and sold by "Merit", with the endorsement of Lt. General Sir Brian Horrocks K.C.B., K.B.E., D.S.O., M.C., L.L.B.(Hon).
Merit Cat. No. 6192. Unfortunately no copyright date anywhere on the packaging or the manual, or indeed any copyright notice at all.
This is a two-player board game which I enjoyed playing as a child. It had tanks, artillery guns, aircraft and mines. It had grass, forest, hills and road, which each imposed a different top speed of the vehicles as they passed over them. The game board itself was blank, and these terrain elements were printed on pieces of plastic film which were placed on the board so that each game could be played with a different map layout. However, in Combat, the terrain was fixed once the game began, and mines were not secret -- they were placed on the board and openly visible. Tanks inside forest were protected from being shot, but of course they were still visible to the other player, and Combat did not have that other element of secrecy -- limited visibility range so that you could not see what was happening deep in enemy territory. It was also limited to two players (or two pairs of partners), so there was no question of shifting alliances or treachery.
I liked Combat for having different kinds of terrain with different properties which gave a wide range of choices of route, instead of a simple line of squares along which the pieces move, as in Monopoly. I also liked the fact that the moves were deterministic, dependent on the terrain, instead of being decided by the throw of dice, and the fact that, although the two players took turns, on each turn you could move all or none of your vehicles, unlike games in the chess model where you only move one of your many pieces per turn. In Bolo I tried to keep these ideas, and enhance them by using the computer's ability to provide more subtlety -- simultaneous play instead of alternating turns, and smooth movement instead of pieces moving from square-to-square in discrete steps.
2. "Diplomacy"
Copyright 1976, The Avalon Hill Game Company, 4517 Harford Road, Baltimore Maryland 21214, USA.
At first sight Diplomacy would seem to have little in common with Bolo, but it has elements which I tried to include. The most obvious is the alliances -- the shifting, uncertain, treacherous alliances, of players making promises they don’t keep, of players offering support but then 'forgetting' or 'accidentally' doing the wrong thing by mistake.
The other feature of Diplomacy which deserves mention is the simultaneous play aspect -- all players decides their moves (and write them down on paper) at the same time, uncertain of what other players' plans may be. In chess and most other games, you decide your move with full knowledge of the state of the board. In Diplomacy, it is only after you have committed yourself to a series of moves that you find out whether other players have themselves made moves which render your own useless. It was this aspect of having to make decisions, to formulate plans and strategies with only partial or even sometimes incorrect knowledge, which I wanted to capture in Bolo.
About the author
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Stuart Cheshire is a PhD student working on wireless networking at Stanford University in Mary Baker's Networking and Operating Systems Group.
Bolo was first conceived as a two player game for the Acorn BBC Micro by Stuart Cheshire and James Everard in Cambridge in the summer of 1987. It soon grew into a 16 player distributed game running over 4800 baud RS423 connections by early 1988, but unfortunately at that time there was never any opportunity to run it with more than 8 machines.
In January 1989 work started on porting to the Apple Macintosh, but was not completed.
In the autumn of 1990, after nearly two years break, work resumed on porting to the Apple Macintosh. This continued sporadically for over a year, reaching the first really playable version just before Christmas 1991.
Bolo continued to need the author's continuous attention to keep a game running, like an experimental aircraft being nursed along by a skilled test pilot, until April 1992, when it finally made its first unassisted flight, staying airborne for over 48 hours.
The saga continues...
(See "Bolo.versionhistory" for a history of the program's development.)
Addendum (SOAPBOX) This is where I get to write what I like.
CMaster by Max Lyth
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Bolo would have taken twice as long to write if it were not for Max Lyth's CMaster, an invaluable programmers' utility for Think C.
CMaster provides too many useful features to list here, but my favourite is a popup menu of functions defined in the window you are editing, so that you can navigate around large files MUCH faster than you could otherwise. This allows you to structure your program how you want, instead of being forced to subdivide modules simply because they are too big for you to cope with.
It also gives live scrolling when you drag the scroll box, a feature to place marker points in a file, and when you open any file it restores it to exactly the position, size and shape it was in when you closed it last, even putting the scroll bar and insertion point back where they were.
I could write forever about the huge list of things it does and how great it is, but I must stop somewhere, so here is the address where you can order it:
Jersey Scientific, Inc
545 Eighth Ave 19th Flr
New York, NY 10018
USA
Telephone: USA (212) 736 0406
Fax: USA (212) 947 4981 or (201) 464 3458
electronic mail: jersci@applelink.apple.com
I have no connection with Jersey Scientific other than gratitude for the hundreds of hours of my precious time they have saved with this product.
IMPORTANT NOTE (28/9/92): I REALLY don't have anything to do with Jersey Scientific. Honestly. Please don't send them letters or faxes about Bolo or telephone them asking for me. They are in New York, and I am in San Francisco. I've never even met any of them. I wrote this recommendation to acknowledge a good product and help a small company, not to waste their time answering calls and letters and faxes for me. Please don't call them (or rather, please do, but call to order CMaster, not to ask about Bolo).
Since I have got your attention this far, here's an idea. There are lots of good shareware/freeware programmers who work to make the Mac wonderful, sacrificing financial reward for the pleasure of programming. I think Apple should acknowledge some of the celebrities of this community and reward them with cheap or free hardware, admission to events, membership of APDA etc., in recognition of the fact that they would have to pay teams of programmers exorbitant salaries in order to achieve the same results.
I am not asking Apple to hand out freebies to every Joe who has ever written a HyperCard script, but to recognise a small number of talented and dedicated programmers who have made a significant contribution to the Macintosh community.
Here are some nominations:
John Norstad for Disinfectant (Virus detection and removal, Internet software)
Chris Johnson for GateKeeper (Virus protection)
Peter Lewis and Quinn for Talk/Talkd, Finger/Fingerd, FTPd, TFTPd, DeHQX, MacBinary II+, Script Daemon, Anarchie, MungeImage, CDIconKiller, TCP2Serial, MacTCP Watcher etc. etc. etc. (Suite of Macintosh Internet Connectivity applications)
Maynard Handley for Sparkle (shows the Unix world how MPEG tools should be done!)
Bill Goodman for Compact Pro (Excellent and simple file compression)
David Warker for Remember? (Appointment reminder program)
Christopher Wysocki for Escapade. (Keyboard shortcuts for all dialog boxes)
Steve Christensen for SuperClock. (You all know what this is)
I may add to this list, but I am trying to establish a small core of the real heroes who deserve to be rewarded.
(Before you send me suggestions for the list, let me say that, however well written and impressive, I'm NOT counting games as vital contributions to the Macintosh community.)
IMPORTANT NOTE (September 1994): Kudos to Steve Cisler of the Apple Corporate Library who also thought that Mac Shareware authors should be rewarded for their contribution to the Macintosh community, and actually managed to persuade Apple management to do so, as announced in Apple's press release on 30th September 1994. If you ever meet Steve, buy him a drink for me.
