Gary Wong
@gtw@mastodon.nz
I'm Gary, and I've been on the web one way or another for three decades, and on Mastodon for three years, and I've never joined centralised social media. I've lived in #Aotearoa #NewZealand and #USA, and visited various other places. For most of my life I've been a #SystemsProgrammer at a university.
mastodon.nz
Replying to
@yon@sakurajima.moe
@yon @orci Nice! Me, too. I've been playing NetHack (very intermittently) since Izchak was alive, and just noticed I've only ever played version 3.*. (Though I had also played Rogue in the 1980s.)
In 1993, games were banned in the university lab, but Usenet was available. So I spent much time saving posts, and running some ghastly scripted combination of unshar/split/tar/compress to assemble the source onto a series of floppy disks to take home to compile and play.
I never won the game until version 3.3.1 in 2000: https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.roguelike.nethack/c/Z1ao8wpc914/m/lvKG7v_7VHkJ
In 2007 I accidentally won the Highest Scoring Priest Trophy in the nethack.alt.org tournament. I made some severe mistake in the mid game (accidentally polymorphed and ruined most of my armour, I think), and spent ages trying to recover, while inadvertently accumulating points. Meanwhile, all the good players were speedrunning dozens of ascensions while I was trying to survive this attempt, and so by the time I finally finished, I had a score no competent player could match!
NetHack is also one of the few modern games my homemade computer is capable of running. Time to give version 5 a try!