Atari

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Although Atari is better known for their historic game consoles, they also sometimes made computers. The Atari ST line of computers were capable of running ST Hack, a port of PC HACK 3.51.

The first official NetHack distribution to support the Atari ST was NetHack 3.0.0 in 1989. Support was dropped in version 3.3.0[1], but was "resurrected" in version 3.3.1 by Marvin.

The Atari ST continued to be supported all the way to 3.4.3. However the DevTeam doesn't know if NetHack 3.6.5 can compile or run on the Atari.[2]

Running under emulation

Screenshot of NetHack 3.4.3 running under Hatari.

Hatari provides a usable emulation of various Atari ST models. It requires a ROM to run, but EmuTOS provides legal ROM images sufficient to run NetHack.

The built-in video modes don't produce a good user experience. The color modes do not have sufficient resolution, and only show a tiny portion of the map. The monochrome mode refuses to load the tileset. A usable screen results with these options:

hatari --memsize 8 --harddrive disk --vdi true --vdi-planes 4 --vdi-width 640 --vdi-height 480

where the "disk" directory becomes an emulated file system, and contains an unpacked NetHack distribution. You will need an LHA-capable archive program to unpack the official distributions.

These function keys are meaningful:

  • F2 tries to toggle between the tiled and ASCII modes, but the ASCII mode doesn't seem to work.
  • F3 toggles the visibility of the cursor on the map.
  • F4 looks like it selects a font, but produces only an error "Fontselector not available!"

F11 and F12 are meaningful to Hatari; F11 toggles full screen mode, while F12 pops up a configuration menu (which seems to have some bugs; using command line options is recommended).

References