AllegroHack

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MrFlibble
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AllegroHack

Post by MrFlibble »

While checking out SLASH'EM (a NetHack variant), I learned that its support for high-resolution graphics was borrowed from an earlier project called AllegroHack. This was a DOS graphical user interface written by Kelly Youngblood which used the Allegro library to draw high resolution graphics.

The Wayback Machine has preserved Kelly Youngblood's AllegroHack page, however apparently no images or downloads (either binaries or source code) have been archived. The latest release of AllegroHack, version 2.01, was based on NetHack 3.4.0.

Some more searching revealed that Clive Crous, the author of Vulture, updated AllegroHack to NetHack 3.4.3 in 2005 (newsgroup message). This version was available for a while from Clive Crous' website, but again the Wayback Machine did not preserve the file. The source seems also no longer available.

However, it turns out that a dedicated Russian roguelike community has preserved the latest version of AllegroHack from 2005 (albeit it was repacked with 7zip). I got the file from there, but the game refused to run with an error message both in the various builds of DOSBox and under FreeDOS in a virtual machine.

Thankfully, a user by the name of iunnamed from another Russian old gaming forum helped solve this issue. CWSDPMI, the DPMI provider AllegroHack uses, needs to be configured to disable v1.0 extensions (they are enabled by default). With this tweak, the game runs in DOSBox just fine.

AllegroHack can be downloaded here and here. You can set it to run at 640x480 and higher resolutions by editing the DEFAULTS.ALG file.

Some screenshots:
Image Image Image
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