4 ms·

Is there a way to use appletalk on a LAN? I would love to get a game of multiplayer bolo going in my office.

by royalewithchees 4y ago

pmarreck 4y ago
BOLO WAS THE BEST!
- geerlingguy 4y ago
  Maze Wars and Spectre VR were pretty fun on AppleTalk too.
  - david422 4y ago
    Ah, giant 3d polygons. They just don't make games like they used to!
chris37879 4y ago
There is! netatalk on linux is the package you need for that, and it's still built in to BSD, I believe. now weather that package still speaks the older versions of the protocol, who can say. Interestingly, a challenge you would have with this because this emulator is web based, your networking options would be fairly limited, even if you could emulate netatalk, the browser's security features would preclude you accessing hosts than the server it's on, it's the same reason Fabrice Bellard didn't add networking to his jslinux project.
- zargon 4y ago
  netatalk provides macintosh fileshare hosting services on unix/linux. It has nothing to do with this use case.
zargon 4y ago
Since you can't listen for incoming connections from a browser, most likely no. Coincidentally, Bolo networking was originally designed for serial networks like LocalTalk. The same network logic was used when UDP support was added. So there are assumptions made about learning of another player's network address from an third player, and is the reason why ubiquitous NAT broke Bolo internet gaming. But if you have an old Mac around, you can play internet Bolo games using a Bolo packet re-writing proxy I wrote. We schedule games occasionally over at 68kMLA.
dlsa 4y ago
Something involving a web server, a websocket (ws) server acting as a switch or repeater, a emulator specific websocket client to act as a network adaptor. Each emulator would then send packets via websocket to the ws server which would then send to the other connected ws clients. All the ws would be abstracted behind the emulated network adapter. That would give you enough to let a bunch of Bolo addicts go to the same site and play multiplayer. It would also let them share files amongst those emulators. But that wouldn't necessarily let any of them talk to an appletalk server near the server, eg on its real lan. For that you'd need a tuntap thing acting as a bridge or router. That said, you probably wouldn't require that appletalk/netatalk server. As long as one emulator holds the maps or files etc you could use that as a file server. No tuntap required. Hmmm...

Is there a way to use appletalk on a LAN? I would love to get a game of multiplayer bolo going in my office.

pmarreck 4y ago

BOLO WAS THE BEST!

geerlingguy 4y ago
Maze Wars and Spectre VR were pretty fun on AppleTalk too.
- david422 4y ago
  Ah, giant 3d polygons. They just don't make games like they used to!

chris37879 4y ago

There is! netatalk on linux is the package you need for that, and it's still built in to BSD, I believe. now weather that package still speaks the older versions of the protocol, who can say. Interestingly, a challenge you would have with this because this emulator is web based, your networking options would be fairly limited, even if you could emulate netatalk, the browser's security features would preclude you accessing hosts than the server it's on, it's the same reason Fabrice Bellard didn't add networking to his jslinux project.

zargon 4y ago
netatalk provides macintosh fileshare hosting services on unix/linux. It has nothing to do with this use case.

zargon 4y ago

Since you can't listen for incoming connections from a browser, most likely no. Coincidentally, Bolo networking was originally designed for serial networks like LocalTalk. The same network logic was used when UDP support was added. So there are assumptions made about learning of another player's network address from an third player, and is the reason why ubiquitous NAT broke Bolo internet gaming. But if you have an old Mac around, you can play internet Bolo games using a Bolo packet re-writing proxy I wrote. We schedule games occasionally over at 68kMLA.

dlsa 4y ago

Something involving a web server, a websocket (ws) server acting as a switch or repeater, a emulator specific websocket client to act as a network adaptor. Each emulator would then send packets via websocket to the ws server which would then send to the other connected ws clients. All the ws would be abstracted behind the emulated network adapter. That would give you enough to let a bunch of Bolo addicts go to the same site and play multiplayer. It would also let them share files amongst those emulators. But that wouldn't necessarily let any of them talk to an appletalk server near the server, eg on its real lan. For that you'd need a tuntap thing acting as a bridge or router. That said, you probably wouldn't require that appletalk/netatalk server. As long as one emulator holds the maps or files etc you could use that as a file server. No tuntap required. Hmmm...