Part One - Downloading & Installation
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About this guide
It can be a daunting process installing and getting to grips with a complex game like Angband. Unfortunately this often deters players who would otherwise enjoy it a lot.
This guide aims to take you through the whole process of downloading, and installing the game, then get you going with your first character. Along the way I'll try to explain what's what and where possible give pointers to where you can find out more.
There's very little (beyond the RISC OS specific installation instructions) in this guide that isn't also in the online help, by the way. Indeed, there's a lot in the online help that isn't in this guide (for instance how magic works, etc.) but I've tried to cover the most important things to 'get you going' if you see what I mean. I'll explain how to use the online help in part two.
The downloading and installation instructions are pretty basic (and mostly covered by the documentation that comes with the game anyway) so you may want to skip them if you've already downloaded and installed the game OK.
Downloading the game
The first thing to be done is to download the game itself. It comes in the form of a Zipfile which can be extracted using SparkFS or SparkPlug. I'll be describing the use of SparkPlug, but SparkFS will work just as well.
Download the archive from here (shift-click on the link).
Installing the game
This section pretty much just goes over the installation instructions in the !Read1st! file in the archive.
- Create a directory on your hard disc called Angband (or whatever
you want to call it). - Load SparkPlug and drag the archive you downloaded to it.
SparkPlug will open a window showing the contents of the archive. - Click menu over the SparkPlug window and choose Select All
from the menu that appears. - Drag everything from the archive into your newly created directory.
One of the files you just dearchived should be called font-acn/p (or font-acn/prf if your filing system supports long filenames). If it's called font-acn_p (or font-acn_prf) then you need to use one of the Demunge files supplied:
- If your filing system supports long filenames (ie. the file ended up
called font-acn_prf) then you should double-click on the
!DeMunge file. - If your filing system doesn't support long filenames (most don't) then
you should double-click on the !DeMunge10 file.
You can now safely delete both the !DeMunge files.
The other files supplied are:
- !History
- A potted history of the things I've done to my port of the game. You
can safely ignore this unless you really want to know.
- !RelNotes
- A few notes that might be important. As it happens, they aren't in this
file as they only really apply to people who are upgrading from earlier
versions.
- font-acn/prf (or font-acn/p)
- You can ignore this for now too. The !Read1st! file has some
quick instructions on how to install and use this to get the game to
use IBM style 'graphical' characters for the dungeon walls, etc.
- ReadMe
- The original Angband ReadMe document. You can, by and large,
ignore this too.
Still with me? Then you're ready to create your first character, which I'll look at in part two.