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Re: Bolo up on Asimov and a mystery post found?
On Wednesday, October 17, 2012 3:00:53 PM UTC-5, Hot Rod wrote:
> Bolo is on Facebook though (oddly enough):
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> http://www.facebook.com/pages/Apple-II-BOLO/118045504881368?sk=info
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> And the author, Jim Lane, did post a recent comment about it here:
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> http://www.techipedia.com/2006/revisiting-the-80s-apple-ii-games/
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> in which he says:
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> James Lane / February 10, 2009
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> As far as I know, it is possible to win at the highest level of the game. It’s hard to do, though – deliberately so. Most computer games of the time were easy enough that players would get tired of them fairly quickly. Bolo was designed to be challenging even for very practiced players.
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> There was a minor extra built in to the game. If you did manage to win at the highest level, something happened on the screen. It wasn’t major; just enough that knowing about would prove that you actually had won, at least until word got out.
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> James Lane
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> Author of the Apple ][ game, “Bolo”
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> So..., now to hack it to win at level 9 and see what it does?
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> ]HR
Ooop, and some more good info he added:
James Lane / May 28, 2009
Gerald: Yup, I remember cutting notches in floppies, too. But the first time I did that, they were 8″ floppies, not 5 1/4″
Re playing/winning at the highest difficulty levels: IIRC, there were 9 levels. I don’t think I ever won a game above level 6, and even that was rare. I figured that there would be players much more skilled than I was, and I hoped that the extra 3 levels might be enough to challenge even them.
If you have the original game, and particularly if you have access to at least a picture of an Apple ][ keyboard, take a look at the game controls. There were three sets: the joystick, a set of keys on the left side of the keyboard, and a set on the right side of the keyboard.
It was built that way to allow two simultaneous players; one as driver and another as gunner. Of course, it also supports three players, but I didn't have any idea how they could split up the workload.
Some Bolo trivia:
As far as I know, Bolo was the first published, commercial game that had a tie-in to a novel (or novels, in this case). Unfortunately, Keith Laumer refused to write a scenario description. My (now-ex) wife and I came up with it. To the relief of readers everywhere, I haven't had anything to do with any short-short story (or any other length story) since.
Bolo was inspired by a game I saw running as a demo on some now long-forgotten small computer. I think the demo was supposed to show off the machine's monochrome-only graphics. A friend and I started Bolo together, but he dropped out for various reasons (incl. moving out of state) early on.
Bolo had to be done in time for a holiday season deadline, but it still had a serious bug in the linked list code that handled the smartest tanks. It happens when a smartest-type tank crosses a cell boundary; probably only when that tank is at the end of the linked list. I was too tired (full time day job + part time game author) to fix it before the deadline. Finding it, fixing it, and publishing the fix would be a nice service someone could do for the handful of people who still remember the game.
Fame doesn't last . IIRC, Bolo tied ChopLifter for SoftTalk Magazine's #1 game of the year (1982?)
There are never more than 32 enemy tanks in the game. When the player gets close enough to a base (but still out of sight of the base), tanks that the player can't see are deleted so they can be generated to protect the base.
At one point a few years ago, I was thinking of doing some software development on PDA platforms, and a friend of mine suggested writing a PDA version of Bolo to learn the platform. I ended up putting my Copious Free Time(tm) into a different game (a 4X PC game called Stars! Supernova) instead.
James Lane
Author of the Apple ][ game, “Bolo”
(more good stuff to read in the blog too; these are just excerpts)