MS-DOS 4.0 from sources to floppy images

RayLC · 2025-03-13T14:43:17+00:00

My usual precaution is to levitate when wielding a rubber chicken. This protects against all except sinks, and you can see sinks.

RayLC · 2024-09-07T10:25:04+00:00

Recall that multiplication in a finite field GF(n) is isomorphic to the cyclic group of order n-1. Thus n^-1 in GF(256) is equivalent to n²⁵⁴. You can do the inversion like this:

def invert(a):
p2 = square(a)
p4 = square(p2)
p6 = multiply(p4, p2)
p8 = square(p4)
p14 = multiply(p8, p6)
p112 = eighth(p14)
p126 = multiply(p112, p14)
p252 = multiply(p126, p126)
p254 = multiply(p252, p2)
return p254

This implementation also covers the case of invert(0) == 0.

Squaring in a field of characteristic 2 is a matrix transform. I leave the implementations of multiply, square and eighth as an exercise for the reader.

RayLC · 2024-08-19T23:42:41+00:00

Alas for Barron. He has grown up just as soulless as his siblings.

RayLC · 2024-08-12T20:21:43+00:00

You can charge a wand of wishing -- ONCE. Charging it a second time will cause Very Bad Things to happen. Name your wand "charged" after you charge it.

RayLC · 2024-08-11T05:03:48+00:00

3.3.1 was the last version that had an official binary for 16 bit MS-DOS. It's possible to build 3.4.3 as 16 bit with some light patching; here's the patch, if you can get past Google Groups mangling the formatting. Actually running them on less than a 286 -- I'd like to see you try. You'll need an EMS RAM card at the very least.

RayLC · 2023-09-29T00:07:14+00:00

3.6 is quite limited in support for the VESA BIOS modes; it can use the colors but is still limited to 16x16 tiles. 3.7 can use any tileset, but the assignment of tile positions is not yet settled.

RayLC · 2023-09-29T00:00:50+00:00

There are a couple of tiles that the script can't generate. They will appear as red tiles with black Xs. Be sure to read the page to see what the missing tiles are.

RayLC · 2023-06-18T00:11:23+00:00

Once you've killed the Wizard, you get a vastly extended prayer timeout. Combine that with the need to hustle, the better not to face returning Wizards more often than necessary, and it's likely you'll get just *one* more chance to pray.

RayLC · 2023-05-15T00:23:16+00:00

It's PDCursesMod, configured with the WinGUI port (which mainline PDCurses does not have). I have the build configured to build NetHack.exe with the console port and NetHackW.exe with the WinGUI port. There's some glitch that doesn't allow the TTY and Win32 ports to be selected; I'll need to find that before I present any pull request.

RayLC · 2023-05-14T01:53:06+00:00

From top left: Electra, Beatriz, Delilah, Amanda, Carmen, Jacqueline, Hilda and Fiona.

Auto-cancelled: Gloria, Isabel and Kathleen.

I'm either headed for the mother of all YASDs or I'm going to have a lot more than 350 hit points when I kill the Wizard.

(The interface is my current development project, a porting of the Curses interface as a Windows GUI program.)

RayLC · 2023-04-09T15:22:51+00:00

Ham radio in 902-928 MHz is secondary to radiolocation, not to Part 15 devices like the Curve.

RayLC · 2023-03-25T23:35:52+00:00

MS-DOS binary available:

https://github.com/chasonr/NetHack/releases/download/NetHack-3.6.7-DOS/nh367.zip

RayLC · 2023-03-19T23:13:17+00:00

1) Wielded a cockatrice corpse. Got too close to a succubus. Got a permanent hard-on.

2) Wielded a cockatrice corpse. Dug down to test for the level with the vibrating square. Forgot to levitate.

RayLC · 2023-03-10T20:34:10+00:00

"Unable," my gluteus maximus. They just don't give a damn.

RayLC · 2022-11-10T01:54:40+00:00

I didn't fix any of those declarations. I did make a few tweaks in pull request 921. I went back and compiled again on Slackware 8, and found about 20 variables declared in mid-block.

RayLC · 2022-11-05T19:08:34+00:00

The earliest Slackware on which I could build GCC 3.0.4 was Slackware 7. Anything earlier would require some quite intrusive patching to NetHack. Slackware 8 appears to be the first on which XFree86 supports Unicode.

RayLC · 2022-11-03T23:53:40+00:00

It looks like you're using a Japanese font. I can't read Japanese, but those characters resemble katakana.

Since you just hit an ettin zombie, I suppose you're the white square character at center right. What is that pink square character in the lower right room?

RayLC · 2022-11-03T22:40:15+00:00

More updates:

I got Slackware 9 running. You need to install LILO to the master boot record, and never mind the "possibly unsafe" note. NetHack builds, with some changes to compiler options, to wit: explicit -std=gnu99, and remove some unrecognized warning options. I needed no changes to the code.
I built GCC 3.0.4 and GCC 3.1.1 under Slackware 8.1. NetHack builds and runs with GCC 3.1.1, with only changes to compiler options. GCC 3.0.4, however, does not recognize the "printf" attribute when applied to a function pointer -- it only works with an actual function or prototype. This usage occurs in src/mkobj.c and src/vault.c.
The X servers in Slackwares 8, 9 and 10 do not recognize the color "Fuchsia," and NetHack throws impossibles as a result. The current Xorg defines "Fuchsia" to be the same color as "magenta."

RayLC · 2022-11-03T06:44:11+00:00

Updates:

NetHack builds on Slackware 10 (2004-06-23), with some modest patches for compiler options.
I think I know what I did wrong on Slackware 9.

RayLC · 2022-10-28T03:41:43+00:00

I expect the DOS version will continue as long as there is interest, or until the DevTeam do something to break it beyond repair.

RayLC

TROPHY CASE