angband for dos?

[hyperactive]

Hello there.
I am totally blind and I use a speech synthesiser to read out loud text on the screen.
I was wondering if it was possible for you kind folks to develop a dos port of angband 3.4.1?
I remember earlier versions of angband being put out for dos, and I had a great time playing with it.
I find this is the easiest platform to play with because the game uses ascii text. The windows port on the other hand doesn't really play nice with my speech software.
Cheers and thanks.

[Nick]

The dos port has been gone for a while - I'm not sure how hard it would be to resurrect it.

There is another poster on these forums called Dark who is blind and uses a screen reader. His posts may be worth reading to get tips on things that help.

[Timo Pietilä]

The dos port has been gone for a while - I'm not sure how hard it would be to resurrect it.

There was Windows console port not very long ago. Not same as dos which is ancient. Tried to find that, but haven't found it yet.

[takkaria]

There was Windows console port not very long ago. Not same as dos which is ancient. Tried to find that, but haven't found it yet.

It would be easy to put out a release using the Windows console. I'll try and release 3.5 with that port included.

[PowerWyrm]

It would be easy to put out a release using the Windows console. I'll try and release 3.5 with that port included.

Can't you use the GCU port? I've included that for my variant and it looks like a Windows console port to me...

[takkaria]

Can't you use the GCU port? I've included that for my variant and it looks like a Windows console port to me...

Yup, it is the GCU port, compiled using PDCurses.

[hyperactive]

Even if you were to make a windows console version, I still won't be able to play it effectively, because modern screen readers like jawas.. er.. Junk.. oops. I mean jaws for windows and NVDA are not primarily designed to work with complicated console applications that use punctuation marks as graphics, therefore, the best way I have found to play these types of games is to use some legacy hardware and an old tsr program called automatic screen access program or ASAP for short and then load angband over the top of it. Until the dos port was discontinued, it worked quite well.
I hope some kind of arrangement can be made so that I can continue to enjoy playing 3.4.1.
Thanks.

[Timo Pietilä]

Even if you were to make a windows console version, I still won't be able to play it effectively, because modern screen readers like jawas.. er.. Junk.. oops. I mean jaws for windows and NVDA are not primarily designed to work with complicated console applications

I found some mentions in NVDA community messages that BRLTTY could work with conjunction to NVDA to better access to console. Can't find precompiled version though, and I'm not blind so I have absolutely no experience if that's any good or not.

[Pete Mack]

I think what would work best is a real audible interface, such as F-keys printing various Term-contents to console, even if terms aren't visible. That doesn't help with what the layout of the dungeon is. I have no idea how you can do that without seeing it.
Any pointers on how you do this?

EDIT: Also, do you really want to play angband, with all 100 levels? games like Sil/Quickband/Ironband seem to make more sense, since they have a lot fewer levels.

[eMeM]

It would be nice to see proper native W32 full screen ASCII or Dos ASCII coming back. I don't understand why it was scratched in first place (maybe because all developers are linux guys). I dig every thread about this and I was searching for it on other forums as well. I remember that I wasn't impressed with pdcurses version. It was like playing in emulator, very very slow.

[Timo Pietilä]

It would be nice to see proper native W32 full screen ASCII or Dos ASCII coming back. I don't understand why it was scratched in first place

Scratching DOS is quite understandable, it's ancient and has very bad limitations for memory. It restricts coding way too much.

[Pete Mack]

the current version IS native W32, and it works plenty well (now that fonts no longer leak resources.)
The issue at hand is DOS ASCII, or some other way to make the screen voice-friendly.

[eMeM]

But we don't have a *full screen* ASCII version which is a favorite way to play for many old time players and major obstacle when trying recent versions of Angband. Some of these players are gone. I started to like terms windows but would go back to full screen console if only given a chance.

http://forums.roguetemple.com/index.php?topic=2011.15

Most recent DOS versions used cwsdpmi so we were far from memory limits. Right now no one needs DOS graphics or DOS sounds only DOS ASCII. I just wanted to voice my support for this topic.

[Timo Pietilä]

But we don't have a *full screen* ASCII version which is a favorite way to play for many old time players and major obstacle when trying recent versions of Angband.

Takkaria said that it would be easy to do Windows console, so I think it will appear soon. Not DOS, just windows console.

[hyperactive]

Yes I find the current 3.4.1 version slows things down a lot, it seems a bit resource intensive.
As to how I am able to play an ascii game, it's simple if you know how.
The automatic screen access program has a separate cursor which you can use to examine your surroundings. When I use the arrow keys to move around, the hardware cursor is also moved, and when I examine my surroundings with the extra cursor, I can hear the various letters and punctuation marks being spoken, so for example, if I am in the middle of town and there are several t's on either side of my character, I then use the second cursor to examine and see how many paces away they are so I can act accordingly.
Please if you can, I would be really grateful if someone could get the source code and compile a dos version using djgpp, there are no real limits when you use djgpp and cwsdpmi etc.