Topics

1

Player's Plaza / Roguelike via SSH/Telnet server (small FOV preferable)

« on: January 13, 2015, 02:08:53 PM »

I just ordered Blackberry and it seems best way to play roguelike on it (good fit for gaming while in work - short, often interrupted periods) is to use SSH/Telnet connection.

I'm aware of servers for DCSS, but I'm also exploring other possibilities. Small FOV in game would be a nice feature, since screen estate is limited. I like hack-alikes in general (POWDER, Infra Arcana etc.), but Nethack is not for me.

Maybe in the end I'll go with self hosted solution, but first I'm looking for hints, since Google didn't yield any meaningful results.

2

Incubator / Hack (PDP-11 version from year 1985)

« on: April 30, 2014, 03:59:42 PM »

I'm not sure where to put it, if topic fits better another section of forum, please move. edit: It looks like it would fit "The Incubator" better - I would like to request move, if anyone capable of doing so is reading this.

So I was tinkering with old Hack versions for some time. For those unfamiliar, before NetHack there was a Hack: http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Game_history Version 1.0.3 of Hack made by Andries Brouwer is still distributed with NetBSD and OpenBSD systems. It isn't much a challenge to get it working on Linux. I decided to go with even older version.

Code for Hack version 1 for PDP-11 was released according to email timestamps in February 1985: http://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Jay_Fenlason%27s_Hack I had some previous experience with code archeology (running C code from year 1989), so what not compile PDP-11 Hack then? It took me about hour to patch code a little, maybe more before it compiled, linked and displayed something. Some screenshots:




First one should be familiar. At that point you could move in the game and explore dungeon, but bumping into anything would crash the game (same goes for things like opening help etc). Still seeing this screen for the first time was quite something.

Second one is result of some hidden code. Game prohibited playing in working hours (9:00-17:00 Monday-Friday).

I worked a bit more on code, which included tracing some problems with GDB. In some cases that wasn't much of use either, since whole stack was smashed - venerable printf debugging did come to rescue. I got to the point, when game was quite playable, so I made video with my commentary, which is about 10 minutes long: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ros1L0LycA

I'm not sure were I will go with this, if anywhere at all. As I pointed in video, distribution of changed code is questionable for many reasons. Still maybe some folks here will enjoy this video a little bit.