Using and Installing Amiga NetHack 3.4 (or Everything You Never Wanted to Know Before NetHacking) (or Not Everything That Happens Always Comes Knocking) Last Revision: 28 March 2000 for NetHack 3.4.2 0. Pre-intro for NetHack 3.4.2: Amiga-specific changes for 3.4.2: Most (around 99%) known bugs fixed (volunteers welcome). HackWB and HackCli are no longer supported. Use the main binary. We would like to thank each and every one of the people who took the time and effort to report bugs to us. THANK YOU! I. Introduction I.A. Overview Welcome to Amiga NetHack! If this is your first visit to our fair city, you are in for an amazing but dangerous journey; if you have visited us before, beware! the city has changed in many strange and subtle ways; it has also grown quite a bit. This missive brings to light those mundane tasks which must be dealt with before beginning your journey; for those of you who are faced with the task of installing the pre-fabricated version of our town, section III (Installing Amiga NetHack 3.4) will guide you through the task at hand. If you are ready to visit, the local visitors guide is in section II (Using Amiga NetHack 3.4); please also see the general guide packaged separately (the file "GuideBook"). To all our visitors, a hearty Welcome! - and please be careful. [Those responsible for the previous paragraphs have been sacked. The documentation has been completed at great expense in a more traditional style. -- The Management] I.B. Getting Help If you have questions about strategy, weapons, or monsters, the best place to go for help is the Usenet newsgroup rec.games.roguelike.nethack. If you have problems with installation or think you have found a bug in the game, please report it by electronic mail to the development team at nethack-bugs@nethack.org, where it will be routed to the appropriate person. Include your configuration, the version of NetHack you are playing (use the 'v' command), whether or not you are using an official binary release (and if so which one) and as much specific information as possible. As NetHack runs on many different machines, be sure to mention that you are playing the Amiga version. I.C. Credits Olaf Seibert first ported NetHack 2.3 and 3.0 to the Amiga. Richard Addison, Andrew Church, Jochen Erwied, Mark Gooderum, Ken Lorber, Greg Olson, Mike Passaretti, and Gregg Wonderly polished and extended the 3.0 and 3.1 ports. Andrew Church, Ken Lorber, and Gregg Wonderly are responsible for the 3.2 port. Janne Salmijärvi resurrected the amigaport for 3.3 and Teemu Suikki joined before 3.4.0. II. Using Amiga NetHack 3.4 Run NetHack from the shell or from some tool that allows that, ie. ToolManager. See the NetHack.txt file for command line options and other usage. II.A. Sources of Information Where to go depends on what you want to find out. If you want to find out about distributing NetHack, read the license (in NetHack:license or type ?i during the game). For an introduction to NetHack, read the GuideBook file. To find out what options are compiled into your copy of NetHack, type #v during the game. Finally, for information during the game on all kinds of things, type ? and select from the menu or by pressing Help key. II.B. The Amiga NetHack WorkBench Front End Starting from 3.3.0 HackWB is not supported. II.C. The Amiga NetHack CLI Front End Starting from 3.3.0 CLI Front end is not supported either. Instead, use the main binary. See NetHack.txt file for the standard Unix flags for NetHack. In addition to those flags, Amiga NetHack accepts the flags -l to force non-interlaced mode and -L to force interlaced mode. II.D. Amiga-Specific Information for NetHack There are several options that are unique to the Amiga version of NetHack that may be specified in the NetHack.cnf file or on an OPTIONS line: altmeta allows the ALT keys to function as META keys. The default is altmeta. flush flush discards all characters in the queue except the first, which limits typeahead accidents. The default is !flush. silent turn off the audio output. The default is silent. The current version of Amiga NetHack also supports menu accelerators. See Guidebook.txt for a detailed description. Also supported is selecting the number of stacked objects to drop, used with the (D)rop command. Type the number and then select an item (or items with accelerators). Items with a count associated with them are denoted with # in place of -. I.e. 'd - 3 blessed daggers' becomes 'd # 3 blessed daggers'. You can clear the count by hitting esc while counting or deselect and reselect the item. The default is to drop all selected items (as before). For other options how to configure the screen setting and colors refer to Nethack.cnf. III. Installing Amiga NetHack 3.4 III.A. General Installation Installation should be easy - basically it consists of putting files where they belong and adding an assign to your startup. If you are installing from the official binary distribution, simply unpacking the archive in the appropriate directory will put the files in the places they belong. IF YOU ALREADY HAVE A PREVIOUS VERSION INSTALLED YOU MUST DELETE THE OLD SAVE AND BONES FILES - THEY WILL NOT WORK! This includes save and bones files from all previous versions of NetHack (yes, even 3.3.1). If you have a game in progress and want to finish it, use your current version and then update. Will NetHack fit on your machine? NetHack 3.4 is large. NetHack 3.4 is very large. You will need: > Any standard series Amiga: 500, 600, 1000, 1200, 2000, 2500, 3000, 4000. > WorkBench 2.04 or later. > At least 3 meg of RAM. NetHack will NOT run in 1 meg (probably even 2). > Mass storage: A hard drive with over 3 meg of free space is highly recommended. Hard Disk Installation: Unpack the archive to your place of choice. Since you are reading this you've probably done that already. Now just assign NetHack: to NetHack directory containing the executable and datafiles and other needed directories. Use the table in the next section to see where things should end up. Be sure that the file 8 ends up in NetHack:hack/8. Configuration Using your favorite text editor, edit NetHack:NetHack.cnf to match your system. Create the save file directory (makedir NetHack:save) and the levels file directory (makedir NetHack:levels), if they don't already exist. Create the score file (echo to NetHack:record) and, if desired, the log file (echo to NetHack:logfile), if they don't already exist. You may leave out logfile, but record is needed. III.B. File Location Table NetHack: amii.hlp Guidebook.txt hack.font license NetHack NetHack.cnf NetHack.txt nhdat nhsdat record Recover Recover.txt logfile (optional, but useful) NetHack:hack 8 NetHack:tiles monsters.iff objects.iff other.iff IV. BBS Interface [Since HackCli and split binary is no longer supported the following probably doesn't apply anymore. Due to lack of a suitable environment it is also untested.] The BBS mode is based on the standard NetHack tty port and is designed for use in a BBS setting - it is specifically not recommended for use on the console. The current TTY mode has changed significantly since the preliminary version released with 3.1.2. In particular, BBS mode now works with split binaries (only), and now supports multiple games in progress at the same time for multi-line boards (note however that any individual user should not be allowed to run two instances of NetHack at the same time). To set up NetHack for use with a BBS, set OPTIONS=windowtype:tty and unset DUNGEONS, TRAPS, and EFFECTS in NetHack.cnf. Configure the BBS to expect I/O through stdin and stdout, and have NetHack invoked as: HackCLI :uid -u uname options... where uid is any string (without embedded spaces, colons, or slashes) that is unique for each BBS user and uname is some corresponding human- readable name for that user. Uid is used in constructing file names to prevent collisions between simultaneous games and to prevent people from using other people's save files. Uname is the name the character will have in the game and the name that will appear in the record file. The terminal is assumed to be a 24x80 ANSI-compatible terminal. The present version does not deal with situations such as low memory gracefully - as NetHack uses a considerable amount of memory this is particularly painful with multiple games in progress. Sysops are reminded to be familiar with the recover utility, which may be needed from time to time and which should probably not be available directly to users. Bug reports and suggestions for improvements are requested from the user community - this is still considered alpha software.