Stuart Hacking

O.K. So, this is kind of a followup to a previous post I did about how I like to setup Nethack on my Mac. However, more recently, some of the patches I had used stopped working on later versions of Mac OS (10.5 and 10.6). So I spent a bit of time looking into this today and I got some positive results. (update: I think the problem I had with Menucolor compiling was that it didn’t like the regexp method – I changed this to simply use the wildcard matching.)

Nethack with Status Colors and Menu Colors

Unfortunately, because the two patches I’m applying have resulting conflicts- it meant manually applying the patches to the source code in some cases (also: I’m lazy). I, therefore, don’t have an elegant method of actually applying the two patches that I can pass on. What I am doing instead is providing two things: The complete refined archive of the patched Nethack source which should be ready-to-compile on OS 10.6; And also the .diff file produced from a vanilla copy of the source and my own patched version. I will also provide my new updated nethackrc file. (ok… 3 things )

Here’s some details about the setup this provides:

1. The Status Colors patch is applied. This is a configurable patch allowing you to color code status effects – hunger, blindness, HP, Gold, AC, etc. It’s very, very cool!
2. Menucolors patch applied. This is a configurable patch that let’s you apply colors to popup menus. e.g. inventory items can be red for cursed, green for blessed, etc. Again, this patch is very neat!
3. The initial configuration for getting Nethack to build on mac has been taken care of.

So Here are the links to get everything up and running. I should say at this point that this stuff works on my machine and YMMV. If something is broken and you want my to take a look at it just leave a comment of send an email – I’ll try to fix it if I have time. You may also want to dig through the changes in the patch.

1. nethack-3.4.3-patched.zip
2. nh343-_menustatus_orig.diff
3. .nethackrc

I hope this is useful for someone who wants a nice shiny setup of Nethack on Snow Leopard.

Programming fun, Gaming, mac, nethack, Programming, Software

Ok, some new stuff:

1. BT sent us a new router
2. The router actually has useful features like port forwarding
3. I have the admin details for the router

Playing Nethack via ssh on iPhone

Regards.

Self fun, iphone, nethack, ssh

There is now an update to this post.

This is a quick tutorial post for anyone requiring convenient pre-configured Nethack Files. Nethack comes from a tradition of Hack’n'slash adventure games known as Roguelikes. They are similar to text based adventures in that, originally, grapics were rendered using ASCII characters. This is still a popular way to play the games. This is the end of the similarity, though, as the gameplay is more like that of Dungeons & Dragons or other Role Playing Games.

Personally, I enjoy using ASCII graphics because I think it makes the games more readable, imaginative and because nicely rendered fonts just look better than tiny 16×16 tiles. (How can a mighty dragon be crammed into a small 16×16 bitmap?)

Nethack in Terminal.app

So, here are some things I have done to pretty up Nethack a bit for OS X. Many other people, I’m sure, use a similar setup, and many others probably differ. For added convenience I’ll include my configuration files for download.

1. Build Nethack from source. There is a good tutorial for this on the Nethack Wiki
2. Apply the following Source Code patches: hpmon, Menucolors and rebuild. (They provide groovy abilities like menu highlighting for easy reading)
3. Download a copy of my .nethackrc to configure- this already has decent settings for Menucolors and well as some traditional options: (keybindings, graphics mode, etc). You can get the file here: nethackrc (save it into your home directory as .nethackrc)
4. Make a custom Terminal.app config ad export it. I use Monaco 18pt font, no-blink cursor, autorun /usr/games/nethack. You can grab a copy of this file here: nethack

Gaming, Self fun, Gaming, mac, nethack, RPG