The Absurd NetHack Tileset
The Absurd NetHack Tileset is a tileset for NetHack created by John Shaw. It features large, realistic images of map features. It was once available in 64x64, 72x72, 96x96 and 128x128 sizes. Unfortunately these once-popular tilesets are no longer available at the official web site. The page still exists, but the links point to a site that has been taken over by a domain squatter, and does not deliver the promised files.
Two sizes survive at the Wayback Machine:
Searching for the other links produces matches, but attempting to download the files gives only errors. The zip files are slightly damaged (a single byte is cut off at the end) but Info-ZIP can fully recover the images. Use zip -F absurdXX.zip to repair the zip file.
In addition, the 128x128 Absurd Tileset is available at the abandoned SourceForge project for Noegnud. (Note that this project does not have the current version of Noegnud.) This version is in the PNG file format, and will need to be converted to BMP to use with the Microsoft Windows version of NetHack. (Just load into Paint and then resave as BMP. Be sure to select "24-bit bitmap" or the image will lose a lot of its quality.)
No copy of the 96x96 tileset is known to be available.
Bug W343-2
The DevTeam lists W343-2 as "not a bug" (more precisely, there's really nothing that can be done about it):
Windows 98 is unable to load tiles that are too large. This is an OS issue.
Even the 64x64 size is larger than any other popular tileset. Thus Absurd is quite likely to be large enough to trigger this bug, and can be expected to do so on Windows 95 and Windows Me as well. Users of these versions of Windows should probably choose another tileset.
