Use some bad tileset at the beginning and replace with a better one as time passes. All is handled generically through messages, nothing hardcoded. If the finite state machine detects that thinking is taking too long, then the bot will release control to the game. Players could download new weaponsets into the game and pick and choose which ones to enable. It does all the same things as weapons including dumping messages into the queue.
Players dump messages into the queue as well, but they're alive hence they get special treatment.
8 bit is ugly. Probably 16 bit. This page was created on November 20, 2000.