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.
Without any changes apart from removing the check, ST Nethack runs fine in monochrome mode.
I don't really know why the GEM port didn't enable it and told all ST High users to use the TOS (tty) version instead.
As I said, 3.7 won't ever run on an Atari ST (unless there are some wild memory expansions that get around the MMU's 4 MB limit), but 3.6.7 should be possible on stock STs with 4MB.
Sadly, there's no hope that Nethack 3.7.0 can run on actual Atari STs. Even though I think I could make it run in ST High resolution, we're firmly in the > 4 MB RAM required territory (about 6 MB) and startup and level change is slow because it now has a lua interpreter generating the levels.
This is on a simulated stock Atari TT.
But it runs *very* well on MagiCMac or Magic on Linux!
I think it's the most beautiful Nethack GUI of them all.
NetHackathon
Ingo Paschke
fabriek
jmcunx