Patching

Here is a short guide on patching your NetHack sources, assuming you have already managed to compile your copy.

On Windows

Please see the article on compiling, the following assumes you have installed MinGW and NetHack's sources to the locations shown in that article.

• Download the patch binary zip package from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/patch.htm

• Unpack that into the bin directory of MinGW, so that the patch.exe will be in the same directory as mingw32-make.exe (e.g. c:\mingw\bin).

• Find the diff-file you want to patch, and download it on to your computer, preferably in the NetHack sources root directory, c:\nh343.

Note that linux-style line endings will cause problems, you need to convert those into Windows-style ones! You can do this for example copypasting the contents of that file from a browser window into Notepad, and then saving the notepad file. In this example, we'll be using the menucolors-patch available at http://bilious.alt.org/~paxed/nethack/nh343-menucolor.diff We'll assume the file is saved in c:\nh343\ as nh343-menucolor.diff

• Start cmd.exe and do the following:

cd c:\nh343
path=%path%;c:\mingw\bin
patch -p1 < nh343-menucolor.diff

The 1 after the -p might need to be changed to 0 or possibly 2 for other patches.

note: On MS-Windows, the patchfile must be a text file, i.e. CR-LF must be used as line endings. A file with LF may give the error: "Assertion failed, hunk, file patch.c, line 343," unless the option '--binary' is given.

note: Newer version of windows require administrative privileges to run files named patch, which can break GNU patch, see here for a workaround: http://jameswynn.com/2010/03/gnu-patch-in-windows-7-or-vista/

• Some patches require extra configuration steps before compiling. For menucolors, you need to edit c:\nh343\include\config.h by changing the line

# define MENU_COLOR_REGEX

to

/* # define MENU_COLOR_REGEX */

This changes the menucolors, so it won't try to use regular expressions, because MinGW does not come with regex header files. Menucolors also comes with it's own short README file, which should be c:\nh343\README.menucolor

• Compile NetHack, by running install.bat (Assuming you created one when compiling the source) or manually.

• Add the following to your NetHack configuration file, so the menucolors actually does something:

OPTIONS=menucolors
MENUCOLOR="* blessed *"=green
MENUCOLOR="* holy *"=green
MENUCOLOR="* cursed *"=red
MENUCOLOR="* unholy *"=red

• Start NetHack. Now all blessed and holy items in your inventory should be shown in green, cursed and unholy in red.

Regexp on Windows

If you want to use regular expressions for menucolors:

• Download the binary and developer packages from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/pcre.htm

• Edit src\Makefile.gcc and add -lpcre to WINPLIBS. There's two definitions of WINPLIBS, one is for TTY, the other for graphical GUI.

• Uncomment the MENU_COLOR, MENU_COLOR_REGEX and MENU_COLOR_REGEX_POSIX defines in include\config.h.

• Unpack the PCRE development package and copy libpcre.dll.a to c:\mingw\lib\ and pcre.h, pcreposix.h and regex.h to c:\mingw\include\

• Run install.bat to compile NetHack.

• Unpack the PCRE binary package and copy pcre3.dll into the directory where NetHack binary is. (c:\nh343\binary\)

• You can now use regular expressions for menucolors, for an example see http://alt.org/nethack/userdata/Eidolos/Eidolos.nh343rc or put the following in your configuration file:

OPTIONS=menucolors
MENUCOLOR=" blessed "=green
MENUCOLOR=" holy "=green
MENUCOLOR=" cursed "=red
MENUCOLOR=" unholy "=red

Linux, and Unix in general

The typical way to patch is to stand in the root directory of the nethack source tree, apply the patch:

patch -pnum < my.patch

and then examine the warning or error messages, if any.

"-pnum" is used to strip path prefixes from the patch before trying to apply it. For example, if the patch contains lines on the form

--- slashem-0.0.7E7F1-orig/dat/Jedi.des 1970-01-01 01:00:00.000000000 +0100
+++ slashem-0.0.7E7F1/dat/Jedi.des      2005-07-20 14:55:01.434612456 +0200

you should strip off one level. You should strip off two levels if the patch says

--- a/slashem/dat/Jedi.des 1970-01-01 01:00:00.000000000 +0100
+++ b/slashem/dat/Jedi.des 2005-07-20 14:55:01.434612456 +0200

Example

For the Jedi patch[1]. You'll need these sources[2]. Uncompress the sources.

The patch expect to find the "slashem-0.0.7E7F1-orig" directory.

• You can either enter the "slashem-0.0.7E7F1" directory and run the command:

patch -p2 < slashem_jedi_0.5.patch

• Or rename the "slashem-0.0.7E7F1" folder in to "slashem-0.0.7E7F1-orig" and then run:

patch -p0 < slashem_jedi_0.5.patch

If done correctly, it will not complain. After that, you can compile it the usual way.