Nethack.alt.org

nethack.alt.org, commonly abbreviated to NAO, is one of the oldest NetHack public servers, and by far the most popular. To play, all you need is a Telnet client. On Windows, the built-in telnet.exe is adequate, though most prefer to use PuTTY. On Mac OS X and other UNIX-like systems, as on Windows too, typing

telnet nethack.alt.org

at a command prompt will get you connected.

A wealth of information about the server, as well as detailed statistics, end-of-game dumps, tty recordings and the high score table is available on NAO's web site.

NAO is well integrated with #nethack on irc.freenode.net through the Rodney bot, which announces all deaths on the server, to the morbid delight of all.

nethack.alt.org runs vanilla NetHack with the following interface patches:

• menucolors, compiled with posix regex
• sortloot
• dumplog
• showborn & extinct
• hpmon, with an added option to turn it off
• dgamelaunch mail
• paranoid quit
• slightly modified version of use_darkgray
• showbuc
• window edge
• extended logfile
• whereis-file user game tracking lifted from Sporkhack

Also, NetHack has been compiled with autopickup exceptions, and several bugs have been fixed, including the Astral call bug, a bug that allowed predicting the random numbers, and a crash when dropping gold in certain situations. There's also several new hallucinatory monster names, random engravings, random gravestone epitaphs and T-shirt messages.

dgamelaunch is used to manage the games and user accounts.

Criticisms

Its a pity that NAO doesn't support ssh. There is a good and free ssh client for SymbianOS (Nokia mobile phones) and PDAs, so ssh'ing to NAO could be very popular among mobile users.

As for now (December 2007) ssh to nwserver.ath.cx is the best way to play NetHack on Palms and Nokia phones. Especially the ones with QWERTY keyboard.

Another option would be to ssh to another account, then telnet from there to NAO, should one wish to do so.