BingeHack is a fork of BingeSoft which itself is a fork of vanilla nethack 3.4.3. BingeHack tries to stick closely to nethack's gameplay, while fixing and "modernizing" nethack. It also introduces several features geared towards shared nethack servers (nethack.alt.org, nethack.csh.rit.edu), and towards hosting nethack tournaments. This "multiplayer" functionality does not allow multiple players within the same dungeon. Additionally, BingeHack includes a great deal of patches from the NetHack Patch Database, too many to mention here. See the earliest commits by Russell Harmon for details.
If you do not wish to compile (see the BUILDING.mkdn documentation), or wish to take full advantage of the many multiplayer-esque features of BingeHack, you may play on our public server:
telnet nethack.csh.rit.edu
Currently, the feature set of BingeHack (when compared to nethack) is too large and in flux to list here and be valid for any reasonable amount of time. See the commit logs for a detailed list of changes.
When we decide to create a real release of BingeHack, a full feature list will be written.
BingeHack is made for CSH, by CSH'ers. As such, it is full of inside jokes. Keep that in mind if you don't understand why we made a change.
BingeHack has dropped support for classic and non UNIX platforms. Currently, the only platforms supported, in order of those most tested, are:
- Linux
- Mac OS 10.6 and above
- FreeBSD
- OpenBSD
Windows support should be possible via any one of the many POSIX bindings available for the platform, but this possibility has not been explored.
Keep in mind that if you want to request for a platform to be supported, it has to be modern, under active development and commonly used as a server platform.
We try to be fairly standards compliant, so it should work anywhere, but we test and absolutely require functionality for:
- Windows + PuTTY (with provided config file in extra-game/ folder)
- Linux + Gnome Terminal
- Mac OS 10.6+ Terminal.app
All of these support the full 256-color pallete, IBM Graphics, Curses Mode, and normal mode. DEC graphics milage may vary; you are welcome to contribute patches for this purpose, especially ones that remap VT100 graphics to UTF-8. If you're interested in this, you could also look at: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/utf8-plus-vt100.html
The BingeHack source base is slowly being modernized. The current language level gcc is set to is gnu99. BingeHack will no longer compile under c89 mode. In general, if you are writing code for BingeHack, you are encouraged to modernize any code you work on.