More fun with Nethack & MIPS NT!

Well a friend of mine pointed out some great archives of OLD Windows NT software..  Checking the list I noticed that there was a port of Nethack to Windows NT, namely Nethack 3.1.2  So using the nethack wiki I got the source code, and converted it to a zip file ( tar & gzip on SFU!)

The build was a little weird as it’s expecting the first compiler tools that shipped with the Win32 SDK “Final release” for Windows NT 3.1  While it may have been ‘easier’ to just install the old SDK, you can just copy cl.exe to mcl.exe & make a dummy ntdll.lib ….

Anyways with a little poking around I got it to build & run!  It’s cool!  Although to be honest I SUCK at nethack.

You can download it here.  It’s lovingly hard coded to use c:\games\nethack … I’m sorry about that, as I’ve given up on having C/D/E drives like a ‘secure’ MIPS machine, and just have a giant (haha!) 2GB system partition.

nethack MIPS

nethack MIPS

It’s also worth noting that it’s easier to try to build stuff on a ‘native’ machine running MSVC 2.0/2.1 then copy the stuff over the the MIPS simulator as it is SLOW.  But then that is to be expected.. It’s too bad the Qemu MIPS simulator cannot idle… as it runs one of my cores @ 100%.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.