Credits
I would like to thank Joseph R. Power for originally creating this wonderful game and making it available to the public so many decades ago. I've gotten many hours of pleasure out of this game, in its various incarnations. Mind you, I have never spoken to Mr. Powers, I know nothing about him, let alone where I might find him to thank him personally, but I sincerely hope life treated him well!!!
Later note: In January 2005, I actually got an email message from Joseph Power!! It was shortly after I initially distributed this program. He told me some interesting history about the program, including the origins of the kingdom named N'DIC (New Dimensions In Computing, which I'm guessing he worked at or for). I sent him a reply but never heard anything else from him; sad, but what does one expect from a legend??
Of course, the state of the art in gaming has moved far beyond this simple game, but I still enjoy it (especially with the graphic interface), and I hope many other people around the world come to enjoy it as well.
The image files
tiles32.bmp
This is the tile collection which was distributed with NetHack 3.4.2. Nethack and its sources are distributed under the Nethack General Public License.
The other three image files, unfortunately, are unprovenanced (meaning of unknown origin) images that I've collected in the past, most likely from the alt.binaries.pictures.scenic newsgroup. Ultimately, I plan to shoot my own appropriate images for these scenes. For now, if the owner sees one of these images and objects to my use of it, they can contact me at [email protected] and I'll replace it with something else (or reference them in this document, if that's okay with them).
Ultimately, I'd like to replace the generic combat image with monster-specific images, but I have nowhere near the artistic skill required to create those images, and my odds of actually taking pictures of each of these creatures is probably relatively slim (does anyone even *know* what an Ur-vile looks like??).
Compiler
This program, as distributed, was compiled with the open-source Mingw compiler. Long may she wave!! It's a shame that there really aren't any very good debuggers for it. Because of this problem, I've also compiled it under Visual C++ 6.0, and the makefile and project files for that are also included.
Help Files
The help files were created with the HelpNDoc help-creation system. Most of the freeware help-creation systems are unstable or very underpowered, and the non-free ones are in most cases absurdly expensive!! This one is free for personal use, and pretty cheap even for commercial use, and for $45 you can even get rid of the very small self-advertisement at the bottom of each page. I didn't even object to their very tiny ad, but I registered the program just because I was very pleased with the power and ease-of-use of this program.
Copyright © 2005-2006 Cathartes Aura