Back to files

Feb 2005                JnuxBand, a portable Angband            v0.2.1
                        ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1. Introduction

JnuxBand is a floppy disk that contains everything you need to play Angband, an ASCII roguelike dungeon exploration game based on the books of J.R.R.Tolkien [1].

It is a simple Linux bootdisk, based on Busybox [2] and uClibc [3].

It includes a lot of documentation and you can, of course, save your game on another floppy disk.

[1] http://www.thangorodrim.net/
[2] http://www.busybox.net/
[3] http://uclibc.org/

2. Features

A small Linux system, no hard drive or CDROM support, only floppy. Angband version 3.0.5, complete, with bonus documentation, help and spoilers. Support transparent load/save on floppy disks (including the jnuxband floppy disk), in MS-DOS, VFAT or EXT2. Support for international US and French keyboard. Feature some console fonts. Some Busybox applets, like Vi clone, gzip, loadkmap, etc. You have everything to do a floppy copy, if you want to easily redistribute JnuxBand for example ;-) You can use a tmpfs filesystem if you want to do work.

2. Requirements

You need a PC with monitor, floppy drive and keyboard. Should boot with anything above an i486 and should work with any kind of common keyboard, including USB. About memory requirement, tests show that you need more than 8MB. Should work with 12MB, though. Don't expect to use all the funny options of Angband in this case.

3. Installation

This is a little bit tricky because the floppy image is more than 1.44MB.

Linux

If you are using Linux, that's very simple. Download the last JnuxBand package [1], uncompress it, put a blank floppy in the drive and type "./install.sh" as root. The script use very common program that you can find on any Linux distribution. That's all.

b) Others

If you are using another system, like MS Windows, you will need a special software [2] to copy the image to the floppy. Sorry, Rawrite doesn't work here.

[1] http://ngc891.blogdns.net/projects/jnuxband/jnuxband-latest.tar.bz2 [2] for example http://www.winimage.com/download.htm

4. How to play

Put the floppy in the drive and reboot. You should see a greeting screen. If not, check the BIOS to insure that drive A is the first boot device [1]. You can push <ENTER> or wait 20 seconds to get JnuxBand starting. You will then be able to see this help screen:

--
You can change keyboard mapping by typing 'FR' to get a french azerty keyboard, or 'US' to get back the default US qwerty mapping.

--
You can change the console fonts by several commands:

To get a CP850 font of size 8, 14, 16, respectively type: 'FA1', 'FA2' and 'FA3'.

For Lat0 font of size 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, respectively use: 'FB1', 'FB2', 'FB3', 'FB4', and 'FB5'.

If the display is messy (staircase effect), and 'reset' do nothing, type: CTRL-C, CTRL-D, ENTER

--
Type 'play' to start the game. Then, <CTRL>-X to exit. You may want to use another floppy disk, see the menu.

--
I included a lot of documentation about Angband, check the user menu of the online help system (by typing '?'). You will find FAQ, guide and spoilers.

--
You can do a 'mount /tmp' to get a tmpfs filesystem. You will have half of your RAM in /tmp in order to work.

--
Type 'bye' to exit.

During game, type '?' to get help, '=' to modify options and <CTRL>-X to save and quit. Good luck.

[1] http://www.pcmech.com/bios.htm

5. No floppy drive ?

You can use qemu to test the image without writing it to a floppy disk :

qemu -fda jnuxband-0.2.1.img -boot a