mastodon 4.7.3Infosec by day, old computers, synths and electronic music by night. Degree in CS.
Formerly ipaschke@mastodon.social
Worked on NetHack 5.0 for m68k some more over the weekend.
It now supports all major Nethack 5 UI features:
Still needs some testing + polish, so it's not yet publicly available.
Some enhancements coming to Amiga and Atari too.
Here's the classic Mac port of Nethack 3.7 I've been working on.
There are still some bugs remaining and some clean up to be done, but I wanted to put this out there for you to play.
It should run on Macs running System 7+ with at least 5 MB of free RAM and a 68020 processor.
https://github.com/ingpaschke/NetHack/releases/tag/v3.7.0-mac68k
The second installment in "Update all the orphaned ports!": Frotz for the Amiga.
This great Amiga port from 2007 now uses the newest Z-Code engine from Frotz 2.5.5 (2025).
Should be available soon on aminet.
#Amiga #interactivefiction #textadventure #retroComputing #infocom
Surprise release of Nethack 5.0.0!
Please help me test NetHack for the Atari ST, especially if you have real hardware capable of running it.
https://github.com/ingpaschke/NetHack/releases/tag/v5.0-atari-wip
And the final port in my m68k-Nethack 3.7 trilogy is up and running! The last known version of Nethack for classic Macs was 3.1.3 (1993), I believe.
It seem to be fully playable, but there are a few quirks remaining, the most annoying: No status bar. And clicking on the map currently produces a "program in disorder" message... And lua seems to be extra slow: It takes about 2 minutes to initialize! Slower than on the Amiga 1000.
Here's my GEM ZCode-Interpreter for anyone who's interested.
V3-V8, text only, Quetzal saves, input history, notepad feature. Needs about 450KB + size of the game. Plays nice with MagiC and MiNT.
I ported my experimental Z-Code interpreter to the Atari ST, mainly because all other platforms have better options and there is no good GEM interpreter for the Atari.
It also runs V3-V8, passes all tests included in the Frotz distribution, has command history and the Notepad-feature with copy and paste from the story window for notekeeping (notes are saved in the Quetzal compliant save files)
Progress: The map now has its own window and uses the Amiga port's intelligent update mechanism. It now plays quite nice, but there is still a lot to do.
If you have an Amiga with at least 4 MB of RAM, you can help me test this early build of Nethack-3.6.7
https://drive.proton.me/urls/2SGX26WPFC#k1Wa2HUjn62T
Unpack the archive, assign nethack: to that directory, make sure to have a resonably large stack size (like "stack 65535") and run NetHack.
Users with RTG graphics can set "amitile" as the window type in Nethack.cnf.
It bugged me that my Nethack 3.6.7 Atari port couldn't actually run on an Atari ST, so I tried again.
Nethack's beautiful GEM interface never ran on stock Atari STs, because it needed a 16 color mode with a high resolution like 640x480. That now works again and should run on a Mega ST 4 with a VME graphics card like the ET4000. That required memory optimizations and palette remapping code to make the 32 color NH3.6 palette look good and still have sane GEM colors.
My Infocom interpreter now running on System 7. It uses the Textedit component for everything. That works quite well for now but maybe I'll run into limitations with this approach later.
@syllopsium@peoplemaking.games That's good progress for today, but will take a while until it's ready.
🤔
This turns out to be extra hard because of how broken just about everything is with crosscompilers and emulators for classic Macintosh.
Retro68 can't handle large executables. Basilisk is such a patched up mess that it doesn't behave like a real Mac at all when it comes to broken executables. Qemu can't even trigger the debugger on execeptions. Its gdb bridge can't even get the byte order of registers right.
I hate it all. I'm close to just flipping the table an call it quits.
I'm looking for a service manual for a Panasonic SA-65. hifiengine seems to be the only source on the Internet that has it. Unfortunately, they closed registrations and don't provide any method of contacting them for unregistered users.
Can someone help me?
What if Wine, but TOS? Stellt sich heraus, das ist ein durchaus tragbares Konzept...
Vibe coded snprintf...
I got an XTEINK X4 because I always wanted a very pocketable eReader and I'm quite pleased with it.
Replaced the stock firmware with #crosspoint and tweaked the font and paragraph rendering a bit. The device has too little RAM to run a TrueType renderer, so it has to use a prerendered Bitmap font at whole pixel positions. It turns out that if you render the exact same font at an offset of .5px, you can get subpixel precision when placing glyphs. And use that to get smooth pagaraph flow.