A Retro Nethack Interface

nethack.glitch.me

54 points·mmastrac··8 comments

My gripe with these sorts of faux-retro interfaces is that they are emulating the experience and visual characteristics very badly. This is using a TTF font that attempts to emulate a pixelated bitmap font, but it's fuzzy on the edges because of improper font size and scaling. It tries to get moving scanlines on the screen by overlaying a grid of (approximately the same size, but not quite) of dark/light alternating lines slowly grazing the screen, but all it does is blur everything and make it illegible. It's cheap.

Take a look at what a realistic emulation of this sort of terminal display effect is capable of: https://mrmotarius.itch.io/mrmocrt

This is neat in theory but it seems to lock up frequently and the result is that it's unplayable.

Also checkout

DCSS: https://crawl.develz.org/play.htm

CDDA: https://r7st.guru/watchcdda/

Considering the topic here, I'd call the DCSS one anti-retro, since by default the website gives you a tiles-based interface (which is commendably good looking, for a free game made entirely by volunteers). You can configure it to replace the graphical tiles with tiles containing the original console glyphs, but as a console player it never looks quite right (though I'll admit that the persistent minimap, which is exclusive to the web interface, is dead useful).

I used to play nethack on a crt and don't remember it looking like that.

Is there even a modern nethack interface?

Vulture? Depends on what you mean by "modern," of course; I don't think there's a VR interface, for example.

You are meaning modern like 1991 then.

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