Copyright (c) NetHack Development Team 1990-2023 NetHack may be freely redistributed. See license for details. ============================================================== Instructions for compiling and installing NetHack 3.7 on a Windows system (Windows 7/8.x/10/11 or later only) ============================================================== Last revision: $NHDT-Date: 1594155895 2020/07/07 21:04:55 $ Credit for the porting of NetHack to the Win32 Console Subsystem goes to the NT Porting Team started by Michael Allison. Credit for the Win32 Graphical version of NetHack (aka "NetHack for Windows" or NetHackW) goes to Alex Kompel who initially developed and contributed the port. Alex Kompel, Dion Nicolaas, Yitzhak Sapir, Derek S. Ray, Michael Allison, Pasi Kallinen, Bart House, and Janet Walz contributed to the maintainance of the tty and graphical windows versions of NetHack 3.7.0. The build Makefiles and procedures produce two executables: a. A TTY and curses version of NetHack in nethack.exe b. A Windows Graphical version in nethackw.exe. You can use one of the following build environments: o A copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 Community Edition or a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition or a copy of Microsoft Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition OR o An up-to-date copy of MinGW-w64. MinGW-w64 is a collection of GNU C Compiler (GCC) executables, headers, files and import libraries. The official site for MinGW-w64 is https://www.mingw-w64.org/ There are a few packaged distributions of MinGW-w64. We've tried out these ones, but there are likely others that will work: MSYS2 - https://www.msys2.org/ - Download the installer, and start the appropriate bash shell. MinGW-w64 - winlibs standalone build - https://github.com/brechtsanders/winlibs_mingw - Download one of the releases from https://github.com/brechtsanders/winlibs_mingw/releases and extract the contents into a folder (ideally in a folder without spaces in the path), and add the location of the subfolder containing gcc.exe to your PATH. /---------------------------------------------\ | Directories for a Win32 NetHack build | \---------------------------------------------/ (NetHack-top) | +-----+-----+------+------+-----+-------------+------~------+ | | | | | | | | util dat doc include src sys win submodules | | | +------+ +------+ +-----------+ | | | | | | share windows tty win32 lua pdcurses | vs /-----------------------------------------------------------------------\ | Required components that are not bundled in the NetHack repository | \-----------------------------------------------------------------------/ NetHack 3.7 for Windows requires some 3rd party sources that are not directly distributed within the NetHack repository, but they are configured as submodules if you are online and have git, or you can obtain them yourself. Via git (recommended) If you obtained your NetHack sources by cloning from a git repository such as https://github.com/NetHack/NetHack and you have git installed and available and you are online, you simply need to execute the following command from the top level NetHack folder to populate source code into the submodules/lua and submodules/pdcurses folders: git submodule init git submodule update Via zip download If you obtained your NetHack sources from a zip file or source other than via git, you'll have to obtain Lua and pdcurses from their respective locations (at the time of this writing). Windows 10 or newer is assumed below, because wget and tar started to be included in that version. o obtain Lua cd lib wget http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.4.6.tar.gz tar -xvf lua-5.4.6.tar.gz cd .. o obtain pdcursesmod cd lib wget --no-check-certificate ^ https://github.com/Bill-Gray/PDCursesMod/archive/refs/tags/v4.3.7.tar.gz ^ --output-document=pdcursesmod.tar.gz tar -xvf pdcursesmod.tar.gz ren PDCursesMod-4.3.7 pdcursesmod cd .. o update your Makefiles to reflect: In sys/windows/Makefile.mingw32 change from PDCURSES_TOP = ../submodules/pdcurses to PDCURSES_TOP = ../lib/pdcurses change from LUATOP = ../submodules/lua to LUATOP = ../lib/lua-5.4.6 In sys/windows/Makefile.nmake change from PDCURSES_TOP = ..\submodules\pdcursesmod to PDCURSES_TOP = ..\lib\pdcursesmod change from LUATOP = ..\submodules\lua to LUATOP = ..\lib\lua-5.4.6 /-----------------------------------------------------------\ | Building And Running Using Visual Studio 2017, 2019, 2022 | \-----------------------------------------------------------/ If you are NOT using Visual Studio IDE, or you prefer to build using a Make utility and a Makefile proceed to "Building Using Make". When using either Visual Studio 2017, 2019, or 2022, you simply need to load the solution file within the IDE, build the solution and run the version of NetHack you wish to run. The Visual Studio NetHack solution file can be found here: sys\windows\vs\NetHack.sln Before executing the steps to build listed in the next paragraph, decide if you want to include optional curses window-port. See the note just below entitled "Optional curses window-port support." So the steps are: 1. Launch the IDE. 2. Open the appropriate solution file. 3. Select the build configuration you wish to use (Release, Debug, etc.). 4. From the build menu, select build solution. 5. Type F5 to start debugging. * Optional curses window-port support * Since 3.6.2, the community patch for a window-port that uses curses has been incorporated into the NetHack source code tree. That window-port, which evolved from work originally done by Karl Garrison, has been used in several NetHack variants and on nethack.alt.org and on www.hardfought.org/nethack/. If you want to include the curses window-port support in your Visual Studio build, you will have to first obtain the PDCurses sources from https://github.com/wmcbrine/PDCurses and have them available prior to building NetHack. There are two ways to enable curses window-port support during the VS build: Either set the environment variable PDCURSES to a folder containing a PDCurses repository/source-tree OR Place the PDCurses folder alongside the NetHack source repository prior to proceeding with steps 1 through 5 above. /-------------------------------------------\ | Building From the Command Line Using Make | \-------------------------------------------/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Beginning of prerequisite step -- The first step in building either version of NetHack via Makefile is to execute sys\windows\nhsetup.bat to move some files to their required locations. From the command prompt: cd sys\windows nhsetup From a Windows explorer window: double-click on nhsetup.bat If you wish to build from the command line, proceed to "BUILDING FROM THE COMMAND LINE." -- end of prerequisite step -- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Two different versions of NetHack will be built for Windows from the command line using the Makefile approach: A tty port utilizing the Win32 Console I/O subsystem, Console NetHack; A Win32 native port built on the Windows API, Graphical NetHack or NetHackW. The executable for Console NetHack will be named NetHack.exe. The executable for Graphical NetHack will be named NetHackW.exe. The Makefile configuration will build both; NetHackW.exe and NetHack.exe will be able to use the same datafiles, save files and bones files. Since the last official release of NetHack, compilers and computer architectures have evolved and you can now choose whether to build a 32-bit x86 version, or a 64-bit x64 version. The default Makefile is set up for a 32-bit x86 version, but that's only because it will run on the most number of existing Windows environments. NetHack's save files and bones files in the 3.7.0 release have not yet evolved enough to allow them to interchange between the 32-bit version and the 64-bit version (or between different platforms). Hopefully that will change in an upcoming release. I. Dispelling the Myths: Compiling NetHack for Windows is not as easy as it sounds, nor as hard as it looks, however it will behoove you to read this entire section through before beginning the task. We have provided a Makefile for each of the following compilers: o Microsoft Visual Studio 2017 or 2019 or 2022 C++ Compiler The Community Editions are fine and available at no cost o MinGW-w64 The Microsoft Visual Studio makefile was created for use with MS NMAKE which is provided with the Microsoft compiler. The supplied Makefile may work with earlier versions of the Microsoft compiler, but that has not been tested. The GCC Makefile was created for use with GNU Make. II. To compile your copy of NetHack on a Windows machine: Setting Up 1. It almost goes without saying that you should make sure that your tools are set up and running correctly. That includes ensuring that all the necessary environment variables for the compiler environment are set correctly. Change your current directory to the src subfolder of the nethack source tree. cd src 2. Since 3.6.2, the community patch for an optional curses window-port has been incorporated into the NetHack source code tree. That window-port, which evolved from work originally done by Karl Garrison, has been used in several NetHack variants and on nethack.alt.org and on www.hardfought.org/nethack/. The optional curses window-port is available for Windows, macOS, and Unix (and also DOS). The Makefiles are configured by default to include the curses window-port support in your command line Makefile build. 3. Make sure all the necessary files are in the appropriate directory structure. You should have a main NetHack top directory with subdirectories dat, doc, include, src, sys\share, sys\windows, win\tty, util. (You can check the file "Files" in your top level directory for a more complete listing of what file is in which directory.) If you downloaded or ftp'd the sources from a UNIX system, the lines will probably end in UNIX-style newlines, instead of the carriage return and line feed pairs used by Windows. Some programs have trouble with them, so you may need to convert them. The compiler should not have any problems with them however. 4. Edit your Makefile if you wish, but it is not required unless you are altering the build options. Compiling 5. Now that everything is set up... Change your current directory to the NetHack src directory. For the Visual Studio compiler: Issue these commands: copy ..\sys\windows\Makefile.nmake Makefile nmake install For GCC: Issue these commands: cp ../sys/windows/Makefile.mingw32* . mingw32-make -f Makefile.mingw32 clean mingw32-make -f Makefile.mingw32 depend mingw32-make -f Makefile.mingw32 If you get any errors along the way then something has not been set up correctly. The time it takes to compile depends on your particular machine of course, but you should be able to go for lunch and return to find everything finished. The less memory, and slower your machine, the longer the lunch you may take. :-) In any case, it is likely that the command prompt window where you are doing the compiling will be occupied for a while. If all goes well, you will get an NetHack executable. Notes: 1. To install an update of NetHack after changing something, change your current directory to src and issue the appropriate command for your compiler: For Microsoft compiler: nmake For GCC: mingw32-make -f Makefile.mingw32 If you add, delete, or reorder monsters or objects, or you change the format of saved level files, delete any save and bones files. (Trying to use such files sometimes produces amusing confusions on the game's part, but usually crashes.) 2. Depending on the build and compiler and tools used above, the executable produced by the TTY build is either: - a 32-bit (x86) .exe file, which should run on any recent Win32 environment. or - a 64-bit (x64) .exe file, which should run on any 64-bit Windows O/S. **Note**: saved games are NOT compatible between the 32-bit and the 64-bit versions at this time. NetHack.exe is the tty plus curses version. NetHackW.exe is the windows graphical version. Play NetHack. PROBLEMS If you discover a bug and wish to report it, or if you have comments or suggestions we recommend using our "Contact Us" web page at: http://www.nethack.org/common/contact.html If you don't have access to the web, or you want to send us a patch to the NetHack source code feel free to drop us a line c/o: DevTeam (at) nethack.org Happy NetHacking!