some #90s #worldwideweb #history for fellow old web nerds:
if you had a #macintosh in the early 90s, you probably played the multiplayer tank battle game, Bolo.
and if you played Bolo, you probably visited jolo's Bolo Home Page. it was *the* bolo resource on the web, and it began its life on the authors' Duke University Med School web space, before it moved to lgm.com where it lived for ten years.
lgm.com was cybersquatted in the late 2000s, and the bolo home page disappeared from the public consciousness.
the site has hundreds of individual pages, and exploring its pages truly feels like an exercise in hyperlinking.
i spent the last few days recovering the site from IA and rebuilt its absolute link structure. please enjoy the Bolo Home Page for the first time in 15 years :)
@vga256 are there still online bolo servers for network play? I dont have my old macs to hand to test.
@stevelord there is no web client, but if you run a mac 68k emulator like basilisk ii, you can play here: http://bolo.astrospark.com :)
Oh wow I do remember that site! Nice work!
Wasted sooo many hours in my high school's computer lab playing Bolo with friends.
@Daveography 😆 same here! 8 macintosh LC's networked on a token ring.
(of course, there were only 4 of us dorks in the entire school who wanted to play it over lunch hour)
@vga256 oh wow thanks! It’s been too long since my last game…
- replies
- 1
- announces
- 0
- likes
- 2
@vga256 I used to try and get my non Macintosh (ie all) my friends to play it with me. The idea of networked games frazzled their bains a bit. I did a lot of tutoring!
@hypertalking @vga256 I tried setting up a few games with the tracker on bolo.astrospark.com through Marchintosh, but didn't have any luck getting others to join. I don't know if it's because everything was too haphazard, or if the tracker is a bit dodgy or what… We should all see if we schedule a date & time some time and see if it does actually work! :D
@hypertalking 😆 i had similar success trying to get mine to play in our school's computer lab. in the end, we managed to find four people who wanted to blow up tanks on a token ring network.
@billgoats @hypertalking i had zero luck running it on my G5's classic mode, which really sucked the fun out of it for me.
@vga256 Awesome - just boosted on Captain's Quarters II BBS too!
@vga256 @hypertalking Ah, poo 💩 I wonder if it works in Basilisk / Sheep Shaver? I've run it but only ever as a single player…
Wow I haven't even *thought* about token rings in probably 20 years.
Our lab initially had AppleTalk over RJ11. As a computer nerd, it was very exciting for me when the whole school got Ethernet wired and I got to learn TCP/IP.
@Daveography there is an incredible amount of network optimization under the hood that stuart wrote specifically to make the game play well on a variety of network architectures :) our network was painfully slow (token ring AppleTalk over 10Base2 thinnet with those horrible terminators) but it still ran like a dream.
ethernet was still years away for us!
@byteknight 🙏 what a gorgeous sight to behold!
the url is www.dialup.cafe btw - unfortunately the www is important, as it points to a different server 😫
@vga256 Incredible preservation work, well done. I never did play Bolo despite being kind of a Mac user during that period of time (My dad ran his prinitng business off a Mac that I was able to play with during off hours) but it's cool to me that you'd post this now since I recently learned how popular Bolo was from The Secret History of Mac Gaming by Richard Moss (a book I highly recommend if you haven't already experienced it)
@90sScriptKiddiw yes! i adore my hardcover copy of his book - @MossRC is nearby in fact :)
@vga256 I missed this one... Named for/inspired by David Drake's Bolo series?
@abcderian you know, i’ve never seen anyone in 30+ years make that connection! i would not be surprised if that was the case
@mendel wild. i always wondered about the relationship between irchelp and bolo - now i know!
@leadedsolder wow! the thesis was the first time i had even heard of a beeb version.
@vga256 Also, there’s no better nickname for a guy named Joseph Lo who likes playing bolo.
jolo’s still at Duke, too, doing machine learning radiology magic!
@vga256 could you share how you used IA to recover/restore this? Could this method be applied to recover more stuff? Like Apple international FTP archives with localized system software, or Geocities Pages?