Here is a short guide on patching your NetHack sources, assuming you have already managed to compile your copy.
On Windows[]
Please see the article on compiling, the following assumes you have installed MinGW and NetHack's sources to the locations shown in that article.
- Download the patch binary zip package from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/patch.htm
- Unpack that into the bin directory of MinGW, so that the patch.exe will be in the same directory as mingw32-make.exe (e.g. c:\mingw\bin).
- Find the diff-file you want to patch, and download it on to your computer, preferably in the NetHack sources root directory, c:\nh343.
Note that linux-style line endings will cause problems, you need to convert those into Windows-style ones! You can do this for example copypasting the contents of that file from a browser window into Notepad, and then saving the notepad file. In this example, we'll be using the menucolors-patch available at http://bilious.homelinux.org/~paxed/nethack/nh343-menucolor.diff We'll assume the file is saved in c:\nh343\ as nh343-menucolor.diff
- Start cmd.exe and do the following:
cd c:\nh343 path=c:\mingw\bin patch -p1 < nh343-menucolor.diff
The 1 after the -p might need to be changed to 0 or possibly 2 for other patches.
note: On MS-Windows, the patchfile must be a text file, i.e. CR-LF must be used as line endings. A file with LF may give the error: "Assertion failed, hunk, file patch.c, line 343," unless the option '--binary' is given.
- Some patches require extra configuration steps before compiling. For menucolors, you need to edit c:\nh343\include\config.h by changing the line
# define MENU_COLOR_REGEX
to
/* # define MENU_COLOR_REGEX */
This changes the menucolors, so it won't try to use regular expressions, because MinGW does not come with regex header files. Menucolors also comes with it's own short README file, which should be c:\nh343\README.menucolor
- Compile NetHack, by running install.bat (Assuming you created one when compiling the source) or manually.
- Add the following to your NetHack configuration file, so the menucolors actually does something:
OPTIONS=menucolors MENUCOLOR="* blessed *"=green MENUCOLOR="* holy *"=green MENUCOLOR="* cursed *"=red MENUCOLOR="* unholy *"=red
- Start NetHack. Now all blessed and holy items in your inventory should be shown in green, cursed and unholy in red.
Regexp on Windows[]
If you want to use regular expressions for menucolors:
- Download the binary and developer packages from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/pcre.htm
- Edit src\Makefile.gcc and add -lpcre to WINPLIBS. There's two definitions of WINPLIBS, one is for TTY, the other for graphical GUI.
- Uncomment the MENU_COLOR, MENU_COLOR_REGEX and MENU_COLOR_REGEX_POSIX defines in include\config.h.
- Unpack the PCRE development package and copy libpcre.dll.a to c:\mingw\lib\ and pcre.h, pcreposix.h and regex.h to c:\mingw\include\
- Run install.bat to compile NetHack.
- Unpack the PCRE binary package and copy pcre3.dll into the directory where NetHack binary is. (c:\nh343\binary\)
- You can now use regular expressions for menucolors, for an example see http://alt.org/nethack/userdata/Eidolos/Eidolos.nh343rc or put the following in your configuration file:
OPTIONS=menucolors MENUCOLOR=" blessed "=green MENUCOLOR=" holy "=green MENUCOLOR=" cursed "=red MENUCOLOR=" unholy "=red