DOS Games Discussion

While checking out SLASH'EM (a NetHack variant), I learned that its support for high-resolution graphics was borrowed from an earlier project called AllegroHack. This was a DOS graphical user interface written by Kelly Youngblood which used the Allegro library to draw high resolution graphics.

The Wayback Machine has preserved Kelly Youngblood's AllegroHack page, however apparently no images or downloads (either binaries or source code) have been archived. The latest release of AllegroHack, version 2.01, was based on NetHack 3.4.0.

Some more searching revealed that Clive Crous, the author of Vulture, updated AllegroHack to NetHack 3.4.3 in 2005 (newsgroup message). This version was available for a while from Clive Crous' website, but again the Wayback Machine did not preserve the file. The source seems also no longer available.

However, it turns out that a dedicated Russian roguelike community has preserved the latest version of AllegroHack from 2005 (albeit it was repacked with 7zip). I got the file from there, but the game refused to run with an error message both in the various builds of DOSBox and under FreeDOS in a virtual machine.

Thankfully, a user by the name of iunnamed from another Russian old gaming forum helped solve this issue. CWSDPMI, the DPMI provider AllegroHack uses, needs to be configured to disable v1.0 extensions (they are enabled by default). With this tweak, the game runs in DOSBox just fine.

AllegroHack can be downloaded here and here. You can set it to run at 640x480 and higher resolutions by editing the DEFAULTS.ALG file.

Some screenshots:

Jesus Christ!hehe

@MrFlibble:

Well, I hope it is not a virus since I use my CPU for developing DOS games and such.

Anyways, I kindly checked it out and it did not work.

I installed both files.

Thank you Jesus my computer is still running so it seems no harm done!!!!!!!!!!!!

Alright, very nice! More Roguelike love! It's now on the list!

tienkhoanguyen wrote:Anyways, I kindly checked it out and it did not work.

I installed both files.

Are you absolutely sure you replaced CWSDPMI.EXE from a201n343.zip with the fixed one?

Also, make sure DOSBox is set to max cycles or at least something greater than 10,000 cycles. The game is somewhat resource demanding, and may load slowly. Setting CPU core to dynamic should also help speed things up.

Jesus Christ!hehe

I'm sorry about that. I didn't realize you had to replace the files. I thought you had to run both files. I realize now you had to replace one file AND run both files. I'm a dork haha

No worries! I could replace CWSDPMI.EXE with a fixed one, but I decided to keep the original package as it was. However, I think Swizzle of DEMU.org has already updated a repacked version with a fixed CWSDMPI.EXE.