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. Since certain monsters can be hard to see in the default black-on-white OS X terminal, it is best to go white-on-black beforehand with:
xterm -fa Monaco -fs 14 -fg white -bg black &
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
It's 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.
Game interface: message list
Anyone accustumed to the tiles port will sorely miss a separate message window. Instead, game messages are displayed one line at a time in the terminal's top line. Most meaningful actions generate several lines that have to be scrolled by with space or escape, so some players grudgingly get in a habit of alternatingly pressing escape and the "real" actions. However, both space and escape can also trigger default actions, such as selling items in shops, or hide important messages, for example about intrinsics or turning to stone. There seems to be no way remedy this.
This is, of course, standard behaviour in the text-only form of Nethack. If you turn off rest-on-space and use space to scroll through the messages, then you'll trigger no actions by accident. You can also use Ctrl-space to skip all messages at once, then use Ctrl-P to read the messages that you skipped. (You'll also have to set a preference here to have the message history list messages on a full screen instead of line by line; it's also good to have a healthy large number, say 50, of past messages saved.)
