I don't know if you were a big gamer back in the 80s, but one of the best games of all time was BOLO built for the Apple II platform. In case you don't know, it's a shootout type game. You're a ship and you're trying to kill the alien invaders in a maze. By following certain visual cues, you can locate the ship. Once you've navigated to the location of the ship, avoid being hit by these alien invaders and shoot for the core. After you've killed all six ships in a maze, the level starts over again but your score remains. You can change the density of the maze (more walls, making it easier for your spaceship to crash) and there are nine levels to choose from (the easiest has slow alien invaders that don't really know the difference between you and another alien, but the hardest has smart alien invaders who travel super fast and can track you down even if you're going at the fastest speed). A screenshot of the game is here.

In any event, I did some crazy research to find the game and finally figured it out. This works for all flavors of Windows (XP, 2000, and I assume Vista). Here's what you need to relive the old apple days.

  1. Download AppleWin
  2. Locate the file for the game you're looking for. Mine was called bolo.dsk.gz. I got it from Apple2.org.za
  3. Use WinRAR or a program to extract the *.dsk file from the .gz file.
  4. Extract the *.dsk file into the same directory as AppleWin.
  5. Open AppleWin and click on the 1, Master, to open your disk.
  6. Click on the Apple button on the navigation to "boot" your system.
  7. Type BRUN BOLO (or whatever the name of your application is).

That's all there is to it! This post was inspired by my original writeup on Apple II games, but I figured I'd share it for mass-consumption on DaniWeb.

What are your favorite Apple II games?

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its a bad idea to say this

downloading the software is probably illegal as it should still be copyrighted

jbennet, it's hard to say if the copyrights from computer software from 1984 are still enforced. However, you have a point. I'll try to find out with some legal counsel. It's an interesting dilemma, especially if the hardware is unavailable at the present (which oldschool Apples largely are).

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