Welcome to the official home page of

YHACS
You hear a clicking sound.
(a sound theme for the legendary game NetHack)

Current version: 04-september-2004

YHACS exists since 7 july 2003 and is spelled "yaks" as in "Yak - dog food!". It is warmly recommended to install NetHack 3.4.1 or later, specifically the win32tty or win32gui port. YHACS has been tested on the windows platform only and works excellent with both, the textual and graphical user interface.

Who may be interested?
NetHack players open to a new and sound (pun intended) experience. The sound files require far more harddisk space than the game itself, but modern computers are by far powerful enough to handle YHACS.

What is required?
In order to experience NetHack with sound you need to meet following conditions:

• NetHack with sound playback capability (NetHack 3.4.1 or later already integrates this feature -- otherwise use nhsound by Samuli Takala);
• a computer with audio capabilities (soundcard and speakers);
• sound files (available on this page);
• mapping options (available on this page).

Quick installation
Foolow these easy steps:

• download the sound files;
• download the mapping options;
• make a "sounds" subdirectory in the NetHack directory;
• unzip and put the sound files into the "sounds" subdirectory;
• paste the mapping options into "defaults.nh" with a text editor.

Sound files
Depending on your system you may need to put the files into a particular folder or you may choose it freely. Further, the files must have a particular format. The most common formats are "*.wav", "*.au" and "*.aiff". These are the available formats:

• WAV 04-september-2004 (2131 KB)
  The common format for the windows platform. Decompress the "*.zip" file into the correct folder (should be "sounds").

No other formats are currently available. As demand increases, other formats (such as *.AU and *.AIFF) may be added. If you wish to contribute, you may convert the files into the "*.au" or "*.aiff" formats and send them to me by email. I'd be pleased to add them to this page.

Mapping options
Mapping options are a portion of plain text that has to be pasted into the configuration file (e.g. "defaults.nh"). This is an example on how to accomplish this:

• open the file "pattern.txt" and "defaults.nh" with a text editor
• copy [CTRL+C] the contents of "pattern.txt"
• paste [CTRL+V] at the end of "defaults.nh"
• save and exit

The mapping options are written for use with the internal pattern matching mechanism:

• Mapping options for NetHack 3.4.1 or later with internal pattern matching (9 KB)
  Regular expressions are not supported. The SOUNDDIR variable is set to "sounds".
  
  If you put the sound files into a different directory than "sounds", adjust the SOUNDDIR variable accordingly!
  
  More information about pattern matching is available in chapter 9.8 of the Guidebook of NetHack. This is an excerpt:

Some platforms allow you to define sound files to be played when a message that matches a user-defined pattern is delivered to the message window. At this time the Qt port and the win32tty and win32gui ports support the use of user sounds. [omissis] You can verify which pattern matching is used by your port with the #version command.

Support
I'm sorry that there is no support at all. I fainted for lack of food, so my feedback is "like butter that has been scraped over too much bread".

In most cases chapter 9.8 of the Guidebook of NetHack is already clear enough about solving problems.

Currently there are no other mapping options or sound files available. Regular expressions are excellent for pattern matching, but in this context they are overdone, because the messages to be matched are written in natural language and therefore ambiguous. The internal matching mechanism proved to be sufficient and (as it is easier to understand for the common user) it also is more useable (humanly readable).

New versions may be released in future, so check back once in a while.

Your help, advice, comment, critique, applause, bug report, ideas and all that matters YHACS are welcome. To get in contact write me at pi.ri.li@virgilio.it

You hear a maniacal laughter in the distance.