Bolo Manual

BOLO The mul ti- player battle game. (Apple Mac in tosh vers 10n ) ne xS my ¥. ¥, x r .:‘, x y, Oe, oF POO Ee D History Bolo was originally a multi-player game written in 1987 for the BBC microt , a British microcomputer made by Acorn Computers of Cambridge in 1982. Bolo has no connection with the game of the same name for the Apple II, although it is a similar game. The name is an unfortunate coincidence. The game Bolo is fundamentally based on communication between the computers running the game, and on communication between the players working together as teams. Bolo is the Hindi word for communication. How to get it When Bolo is finished, it will be distributed through the normal shareware channels. Until then, people who are prepared to run beta versions can obtain it by the following means: Within Stanford University: by Guest login on the AppleShare server “Bolo” in the AppleTalk zone “Rains”. Elsewhere: by anonymous ftp from “bolo.stanford.edu”. System Requirements ¢ Macintosh Plus or later model of Apple Macintosh. ¢ Any AppleTalk network connection: LocalTalk, EtherTalk, TokenTalk, or even AppleTalk Remote Access. e System 6 or later. t Although it cost only £235 ($400) and was 6502 based like the Apple II, the BBC micro had more in common with the Macintosh. It had its equivalents of QuickDraw, the sound manager, and an INIT loading mechanism. It supported cassette tape, floppy disks of various capacities, hard disks, and had a network file system, with the option of a quarter megabit CSMA network (called Econet) built in on the motherboard. It supported multiple additional slave processors of many different kinds, including the Acorn Risc Machine — the world’s first dollar-per-MIPS processor ($27 for 27 MIPS) — which has now finally reached the USA in the form of the Apple Intelligent Assistant. Its incomparably good BASIC taught me to use functions, procedures, recursion, local variables, pointers, while loops etc. so that for years I never understood the “Goto Considered Harmful” debate — but then I had never used one, or a ‘gosub’ for that matter. It had inline assembler, like modern C compilers, but still provided Operating System calls to do everything, with dire warnings that IBM PC style poking the hardware would cause your program to fail on multi-processor configurations or on later versions of the BBC micro hardware. I offer my gratitude to the geniuses who created this machine which gave me my start in the computer business. The game The game is a tank battle set on an island, for up to 16 players, using separate computers and monitors, so that each cannot see what the others are doing. …