NetHackDS-3.6.7-2

This release includes a bunch of quality-of-life improvements:

• Improve menu handling so that, in menus where a single item is being picked, A or X both work, and in menus where multiple selections are allowed, A does nothing until at least one item is selected. These changes make the in-game menus a lot more intuitive to navigate.
• Enable 'force_invmenu' by default. This doesn't have a huge effect on the port, since it already converted the text prompt into a menu, but it does eliminate some noise in the message window.
• Improve direction prompting by making it impossible to enter anything but a direction character (previously you could enter any bound key, which meant you'd often get greeted with cmdassist window). The prompt also now properly supports pressing B to cancel the command.
• Enable 'herecmd_menu' by default (which triggers on tap), and by default bind Start to pop up the menu as well. This greatly streamlines certain command sequences without needing to bind additional keys (e.g. eating corpses on the floor; just press Start and select the appropriate option).
• Enable 'clicklook' by default (which triggers on a tap-and-hold on a game tile).
• Fix bug where the inventory window can get clipped.

NetHackDS 3.6.7-1

The major gameplay-related change in this release is the ability to detect and bind diagonal keypresses on the d-pad. Beyond that, I've also included a number of quality of life changes as well as some bug and compatibility fixes that make it easier to use NHDS with different fonts and tilesets.

Changes:

• Added support for additional data directory locations (see the README for more details). This makes it possible to run multiple major NHDS versions side-by-side. As part of this change, I also made it possible to place the NHDS directory in the 'data/' subdirectory, following the pattern of some other homebrew.
• Improved error reporting if the data directory is missing. This should hopefully reduce incidences of black screens or other silent errors if NHDS isn't installed correctly.
• Added support for recognizing and binding diagonal presses on the d-pad. This isn't perfect. Far from it. But it works. I've tried to find a good tradeoff between accuracy and responsiveness, here, but it could require extra tuning.
• Disabled 'autodescribe' in the default configuration file. This is a new feature in NetHack 3.6 and unfortunately it doesn't play well with my not-exactly-efficient rendering loop (to be clear, it works, it's just janky). For users with existing configurations, make this change if you're finding the 'whatis' command isn't working well for you.
• Improved BDF font compatibility so more fonts should work off-the-shelf.
• Substantially refactored graphics tile handling to use less memory. This makes large tilesets usable (before, the game would mysteriously die due to an OOM condition) while also correcting some caching issues. Note, this isn't too optimized yet, but it seems to play well on hardware so I'm not going deep on improving performance just yet.
• Fixed the cursor in graphics tile mode, which, it seems, has been broken for quite a while now.
• We now render the version number on the splash screen so you know which version you're running.

NetHackDS 3.6.7

Merge of upstream NetHack 3.6.7 release (plus a couple of extra commits after that).

A couple of key notes about this release:

1. NetHack 3.6.7 includes at least one major fix for builds on Linux environments, so older versions won't compile due to a gcc incompatibility when building 32-bit binaries on 64-bit systems (a necessity for this cross-compile to work).
2. I've also included, you know, all the Makefiles you need to actually compile this thing (though the build instructions still need some work, they don't currently mention the need for a 32-bit compiler environment, which is an important omission).

NetHackDS 3.6.6

Merge of upstream NetHack 3.6.6 release.

NetHackDS 3.6.2

Merge of the NetHack 3.6.2 vanilla codebase into NetHackDS. Otherwise all the same caveats apply to 3.6.1, though I figured I'd just drop the ALPHA nomenclature and hope it all works out...

NetHackDS 3.6.1 Alpha 1

First alpha build of NetHackDS built on vanilla 3.6.1.

NetHackDS is a port of NetHack for the Nintendo DS that tries to make the best use of the DS hardware to provide an easy-to-use, ergonomic NetHacking experience. Below is a screenshot from the game running on the Desmume emulator, though the game is obviously best played on real hardware.

This is not simply a port with a software keyboard. It uses the keypad, touchscreen, and multiple displays to optimize presentation of information and simplify input as best as possible on the DS.

This update includes support for Status Hilites, and strips the port down to be a much cleaner straight overlay atop of vanilla.

This build has little to no playtesting! Basic sanity checking only!