A vintage Apple's game "BOLO"

If you have never played BOLO, it’s worth doing it. It was originally written for Apple II. You control the tank in the maze and have to find and destroy bases. You can download the AppleWin emulator, then google for “bolo.dsk.gz” file and play almost the original game.

Its DOS implementation is a quite precise replica perfectly working on modern systems in DOSBox:

dosbox -exit BOLO.COM

Years ago I created a patch to know what happens at the end:

Unlimited lives
BOLO.COM
00000174: 4F 00
00000178: DF 4A
00000179: FE FF

Unlimited fuel
BOLO.COM
00000A38: 06 04

Immortality & pass through the walls
BOLO.COM
00000C61: 01 00
0000172D: 01 00
00001817: 01 00

With this patch you can play like this:

Unfortunately, there are no sources of the original BOLO available, so porting to SDL, for instance, is fully about reverse engineering of the original binaries (either of the Apple II version or the DOS clone), which is not that easy. I know there are some other BOLO clones for Windows are available, but they are physically different games, not original BOLO.


Disclaimer

Comments