Nethack

I thought I would do a fun page on a topic unrelated to Oracle database administration.  The one computer game I play somewhat regularly is called Nethack.  I first ran across a program called Hack when I was a college student at Harvard between 1983 and 1987.  Our Vax computers with their character based terminals had hack installed and it was a great way to waste time when you should be doing school work.  I also had a PC version at the time which ran on my Compaq portable computer with its two 5 1/4 inch floppy drives. Later versions became known as Nethack.

Nethack binaries and source

A list of my ascensions

Ascension end game dumps:

• Archeologist
• Barbarian
• Healer
• Monk
• Priest
• Samurai
• Tourist
• Valkyrie
• Wizard

Diary that I print out and put in a binder for each game to keep track of things:

Nethack 3.6.1 Blank Diary

nethack.alt.org – very cool site to play Nethack over the internet.  has many enhancements over the base game.  Here are my stats/games: url

rec.games.roguelike.nethack – USENET news group with good Nethack discussion

Reddit Nethack forum – web based Nethack discussion forum

Nethack wiki – Nethack site with a bunch of information

Patches – site with source code patches you can apply to the base code.

Variants – modified versions of the vanilla code.

IRC Libera – Online chat about Nethack – I am bddba on the #hardfought channel

My GitHub repository URL: https://github.com/bobbydurrett/NetHack.git

Branches:

• tigerfix – very minor enhancement to allow a hallucinating player who is polymorphed as a tiger to get the same fun Tony the Tiger message no matter what type of yummy food they eat. When I started looking at how 3.6.0 handles the messages that you get when you eat food I noticed that they weren’t handling a hallucinating tiger consistently in all cases with good tasting food.
• silversword – Just adds a new weapon – a silver long sword.
• crazyants – Adds a new monster type – crazy ants – small and weak but fast!
• building – This branch gives you the ability to build new walls, doors, floors, corridors and even bars. Includes scroll, wand, and spell of building.
• autoletter – Automatically assign letters based on options such as assigning a key to letter k.
• bobbyhack – This is my version of Nethack which includes code from the main Nethack repository combined with my own changes. See the file notes.txt in the top level of the repository.

Instructions for using GitHub and Nethack: URL

Description of the 32 bit version of Linux that I used to use to run Nethack: post

Now I have an Oracle Linux VM running on 64 bit x86.

I use this email alias for Nethack related conversations: nethack@bobbydurrettdba.com

Anyway, it is a fun game mainly for nostalgic reasons for me.  Plus is it cool to have the source code.

– Bobby

Here is my youngest daughter’s interpretation of nethack: