01/21/07

Bolo and other musings:

Today was spent primarily parked in front of the television, watching the Bears and Colts win their playoff games. I did a little programming on the IIsi - nothing worth a damn, but the Pascal brought me back to earlier days, and it was nice to know that I haven't forgotten everything. I'm thinking that it might be fun to think up an actual project to work on - perhaps a game or something, but I'd need to get Volumes I-IV of Inside Macintosh first. I do have Volume V, but the first four would be necessary to do any real work. Perhaps I'll consider that for the RetroChallenge down the road.

Much of my luddite day was spent doing something a little less cerebral - mainly getting my butt kicked in Bolo. I was never an expert in Bolo, but I used to hold my own, and boy am I terrible now. If you haven't played, it's definitely a must if you're interested in gaming on an older Macintosh (here's a good site to get you started). It'll run just fine on anything from a Plus on up, and the downloadable Brains (or bots) that people write make it fun to play even if you're alone. Of course it's best if you have a couple of friends and networked Macs, but the bots are a good substitute otherwise. I don't have an Appletalk cable to connect my 170 and IIsi, so multi-player Bolo for me consisted of multiple instances of the application running on one machine. In the case of the IIsi, I had to turn on Multi-Finder to do it. But it ran well, although on a IIsi class machine (or on the 170), things bogged down with any more than a few instances running complex (i.e. processor hungry) bots. Anyway, it was a good time, and here is a shot of the action on my IIsi.

I thought I should also mention that I have my IIsi plugged into a 17" flat panel display on my desk. I haven't yet decided whether this is retro-sacrilege or not. It's not for a lack of alternatives - in addition to the Sony 15" display I had hooked up to the IIcx initially, I grabbed an Apple 13" RGB monitor in December to keep the experience as 'real' as possible. Trouble is, I have only one desk at my place, and it's not deep enough to support both a CRT and a keyboard. So if I really want to go old school on the display, I'll have to set it all up on the floor somewhere. This would be fine if I were just tinkering with the computer, but since I'm using it regularly, it's just a nicer experience to have it set up on the desk. I'm still running at 640x480, but of course things are a little bigger, and the edges are softer since the native resolution of my LCD is 1280x1024. Here's a shot of the setup. The IIsi is under the desk, out of view. Incidentally, this was taken while running a Telnet session to check weather for a potential flight.

One last thing - I've started using the little icons on the lower right corner of the blog pages to indicate what machine the particular blog entry was written on (the initial blog entries with the IIcx in the corner were written on my Dell laptop). The icons are from System 7.1, yanked from the Finder using ResEdit.