![]() Everything, including the walls and floor is draw with text symbols. Your character is represented on screen by an symbol, other characters in the town (and the monsters, treasure, weapons and armour you will later meet in the dungeon) are represented by other keyboard symbols. Once you have a character created, you appear in the " town" (GIF, 5.9k) with a few gold pieces in your pouch. You also choose a race (Human, Elf, Dwarf, etc.) and class (Warrior, Mage, Priest, etc.). This character is created in the traditional "Dungeons and Dragons" fashion, with statistics for characteristics such as strength, dexterity, intelligence, "hit points" (how much "life" you have), etc. You start by generating a "character" which is your alter-ego in the game. However, we all know that when we leave a dungeon level, we really want to be the only one able to leave. There are some Angband players who will claim that there are better ways to play (and win) Angband, such as using stealth, intelligent retreats, and other less direct methods. Angband and its ancestors are part of this proud tradition basically, Angband is about delving ever deeper in a strange and dangerous dungeon, collecting treasure, weapons and magical items. This has been a common theme of computer games since at least the early '80s, and probably even before that. You don't have to be the programming wizards at id Software to figure out the fundamental truth of computer gaming (at least some gamers consider it the fundamental truth): hacking up monsters is fun. Since it is a text mode program, even if you have been playing for some time (and therefore have a great deal of data in your save file), you should never see any noticeable slowness in this game, regardless of the OS/2 system you are running it on. Other than this quirk, I have never had a problem with running Angband. Because there is no "official" tech support for Angband (although there is a reasonably good FAQ at the Official Angband Home Page), I decided to create a short work-around: I modified the script to only open the "remote windows" and only after these are all open do I start Angband myself. However, some windows do not get created until after Angband is started by this script. It appears that to operate properly, the remote windows must be created before Angband is started. In practice, I have been unable to get the supplied command script to work properly. You can then specify which info you want displayed in "remote windows" (GIF, 9.6k) from within the game. To facilitate this, a command script comes with the game which supposedly will open a few different windows and then start Angband. Note, however, that you will need the EMX runtime files (ZIP, 538k) installed before you can run Angband for OS/2.Īngband also features the ability to have some game information displayed in separate command windows. If you want a Desktop object, you will need to create it yourself. ![]() Unzipping the archive is about all there is to installation. See the "Dungeon Cam" web site for screen shots of some of the "prettier" versions on other platforms.Īngband is a text mode game which is displayed in an OS/2 command window. ![]() But as I mentioned, Angband is available on many other platforms, some of which support rudimentary graphics. I say ugly because for OS/2, Angband is still a text-mode only game. The end result of all this development time is one of the most addictive - although in some cases "ugly" - games ever produced. At least five main developers have worked on the main Angband project over at least ten years, and hordes of others have tinkered with the code or offered ideas for enhancements. Through the years, Angband has evolved, improved and been ported to numerous operating systems and hardwares. Moria spawned a virtual gaggle of games, one of which was Angband (and Angband itself has mutated into many forms since its origin too). Later, a man named Robert Alan Koeneke, while working at the University of Oklahoma, created a Rogue-like game on the VAX VMS called Moria. Because of the capabilities of machines at that time, Rogue was a completely text based game, but for some it was extremely addictive. Back in the dim recesses of computer history, there was a program originally developed on mainframes called Rogue.
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