New version of Crawl released. What about DOS-version?

[Omnivorous]

I was suprised and really excited to see that DCSS had a new release ready, with added content aswell as bug-fixes, improving and tweaking! But I was suprised to see there's no DOS-version available for download this time. Maybe some of you who have been around longer than I, can answer my question; Is DOS-version usually released abit more casually, later? Or does this mean that they aren't even going to make a DOS-release?

DCSS seems to be the most popular roguelike at the moment, it's really well documented and presented through wikis and the homepage, however, to contact developers, ask questions and things like this seems to be abit complex. I couldn't find any better way to do so than posting a comment on one of the last news-postings on the page, and I saw several other comments who were of the same nature.

I seriously hope a DOS-version will arrive. The tiled version reminds me of these amateur, low-budget RPG games, with a cluttered interface and choppy graphics/engine, and the ASCII-version for Windows is barely playable in Windows Vista/Windows 7. It's forcewindowed, colors are -ugly-... ARGH, ASCII in DOS fullscreened is so pure, clean, solid and sexy! :p

[corremn]

Umm, they always release a console version.  0.6.0 is out, is that the version you are talking about?
http://crawl.develz.org/wordpress/downloads
http://sourceforge.net/projects/crawl-ref/files/Stone%20Soup/0.6.0/

Pre-release builds of 0.7 has both tiles and console too. http://crawl.develz.org/trunk/

[Z]

I suppose the problem is that console does not look so good in Vista/Win7... or so they say. They also say that there is a way to fix this, but I don't know how.

[Fenrir]

The problem with console in Vista and Windows 7 is that you can't make it fullscreen.

[Omnivorous]

It cannot be fullscreened, it has a horrible range of colors/symbols. Windows' console version really looks and feels like a bad port. Kinda like acouple of Final Fantasy games and Devil May Cry, that they just ported as quickly as possible over to PC from PS2.. it was unplayable. Hope somebody makes a DOS-version! =)

[Perdurabo]

The solution is ofc to make a tiled version using ASCII-only tiles.

[Omnivorous]

The solution is ofc to make a tiled version using ASCII-only tiles.

Haha, yeah exactly!

[jim]

I am a casual watcher of the Crawl Digest newsletter, and if I remember right (no guarantee there - life's been nuts lately), the devs decided, after a quiet discussion, that DOS releases would no longer be a priority over world building, bug fixing, etc. So basically, yeah - I think they're done. Might wanna ask around the IRC channel if it's important to you. I think it's ##crawl on freenode.

[Z]

I have read that you can make  the console go fullscreen in Vista by installing a video driver for XP. That seems to work, although it is a bit complicated procedure; try to find it yourself, if you want details.

And about colors, colors in Windows XP could be easily adjusted in Windows console. Is this feature also removed in Vista?

Supporting an old operating system which almost nobody really uses, only because the newer version of this operating system no longer supports playing roguelikes in the correct way? I agree with the Crawl devs, this is not something that I would like to do.

If somebody would like to do some programming to fix the problem, here are some options, from best to worst:

• Reimplement the Windows console in libtcod (for example; I suppose libtcod roguelikes looks very well in Vista). There are console tools for Windows which do various things (like DOS Recorder or Console Manager or readers for blind people... or are they also no longer supported in Vista?), so I think such a program would be possible and probably even easy to create. So you run the libtcod console emulator, and then any roguelike in it. That would solve the problem once and for all (that is, all console roguelikes and programs on Windows, other operating systems might be still broken).
• Create a version of Curses which is implemented in libtcod, not a console. Then any Curses roguelike should play nicely after recompiling with our version of Curses rather tham the standard one. (Seems a lot of work. More than the previous option. And less practical. But I am not sure whether the first option is possible, and this is.)
• port Crawl to e.g. libtcod. Should not be much work.
• port Crawl to DOS. If there is any real reason that the Crawl devs have stopped supporting DOS (i.e. some things are hard to program in DOS), then this does not look like someone would like to do, unless they are fans of old operating systems. If they just have decided that they don't want to do that, but actually there is no problem... well, then there is no problem.

Without any programming, running Crawl from a Linux LiveCD also seems an option to play it in the good roguelike style...

EDIT: I have started working on my first option. Should be done soon.

[Z]

Done! See cons2tcod here. I have tested it on Windows XP and I think it looks good. Tell me if it works on Vista.

[Omnivorous]

Great idea!

I've tested it in Vista.

Before entering Crawl, no key-input gets registered to the console, unless I hold down Left Alt. If I hold down Left Alt, all the keys seem to work. I got crawl.exe running like this, but once inside the game, this "trick" ceases to work.
Inside the game, the only keys that I found to be working was the function-keys, except F1 turned into "p", F2 "q" etc.

I have a norwegian keyboard and language settings.

[Z]

Seems hard to test without Vista (Norwegian keyboard layout should not matter)...

I have improved copying keyboard events a bit, maybe it will work better now. If not, you can try running "cons2tcod -t" and see whether you get the same keyboard event shown when you press a key when the original console is active, and when the cons2tcod window is active. I hope I don't have to simulate these virtual scan codes...

[Omnivorous]

Works great now, that's brilliant!

[Z]

Great! Should work even better now (I changed the font and again improved the simulation so that it works with DoomRL for me). I have posted a separate thread in the Announcements section.