About
Bolo is a networked multiplayer tank-battle game created by Stuart Cheshire for the BBC Micro in 1987 and later ported to the Apple Macintosh; a Windows version, WinBolo, still has a small active player base. Orona is a browser-based rewrite of Bolo written in CoffeeScript and built on HTML5 technologies, with a Node.js server for multiplayer games. The author describes it as alpha quality but very playable; the repository is now archived.
How it differs from the original
Much of Orona's game logic was written using WinBolo as a reference, and it reuses the original Bolo graphics and sound files, but it runs in a modern web browser instead of as a native application. Match-making currently works only through an optional IRC connection.
Getting started
A single-player demo runs in the browser on the project's GitHub Pages site. Hosting a multiplayer server requires Node.js 0.6 and git: clone the repository, fetch its submodules, install dependencies, build with cake, and start the bundled server, which explains how to create the small config file it needs.
Known limitations
- compatibility: Alpha quality; rendering may exhibit odd behavior depending on browser compatibility.
Additional notes
- License
- The code is GPL v2, inherited from WinBolo because much of the game logic was derived from it; the graphics and sound files are from Bolo, © 1993 Stuart Cheshire.
- Trivia
- The name Orona comes from an uninhabited island in the central Pacific Ocean.
- Compatibility
- Rendering can behave oddly depending on the browser; the project keeps a browser-compatibility wiki page.