Notices

I think I downloaded the unnethack from HAM, opened it and when faced with this black and with arcaid screen with movable @ symbol and not understanding how to get it to move out from the first box (was there a cat too that moved) I gave up like a totally not my thing.

And now you tell me it would be a very good game. Well if you wan't to guide me to get at least it running and some hints what it is about, I would appreciate. But it will be a pain. Endsormeans have helped me couple of times and it isn't easy. Juiceme has made some instructions I was able to follow. Justmemory gave good instructions for installing Kali on chroot but have never managed to make it work.

So maybe instructions discussion with pm cause it will start with "what is this ssh and how to use it?" question. Think of a person who knows how to copy text to terminal but not much else. Never used 'make' command for instance. My palette of commands is ls, ls -a, cd, cd .., apt-get with purge, clean, autoclean, remove, autoremove, install with -f and fix missing, and dpkg -i, groupadd (just to get rid of an error in ED image), chown with some parameters if I google them to get rights for either sdcard or user/program in ED.

I have never really learned a lot. I search solutions from net and copy and try different scripts to be able to move on. Don't understand at all what are all the system folders in linux. The information has never stuck in my mind. Over 10 years wasted time with linux not really learning. If I would have first read even a one book about stuff or go to some course, I would have benefitted of these years and could be one helping others. But because I found solutions by copying scripts that is wha I know how to do. So sad.

I can upload somewhere also two games from Bada - Settlers and angry birds. But I don't have Bada games launcher :/

Alex Kid in Mircale World runs on MasterGear emulator on mameo.

But i would not try it without a controller (or GameGripper) and at least 4 arrow keys..

Tower Toppler is a native nebulous clown.

Not at all.
Do not play yourself down.
It is all about asking the right questions, either to get something out of any search engine, or to get competent people to not ignore you

For the movement in nethack, it is awesome gain to learn since it helps you to use Vim Editor.
In Vim you have separate modes for most things. So in any other than edit mode where you type with characters, you can move the curser with h =left, j = down, k = up, l = right.
Those where chosen because when you place you right hand fingers in standard position for 10 finger typing they lay on hjkl. From that finger position the index finger reaches left up to z (diagonally left up) and left down to b (diagonally left down) and right down to n (diagonally right down). The middle finger resting on j can also reach u (diagonally right up).
This method to navigate a cursor was widely used before cursor arrow keys and Numpads messed up the experience by having much longer ways for the fingers and even the hand when moving away from the char section.

Imo Nethack is the best way to learn that type of control and get it into muscle memory.

The 89 commands you can e.g. use to manipulate the various items that come across your path have shortcuts on the keyboard.
But you can execute every command by typing # followed by the command name if you do not remember the shortcut.

This excessive use of controls and shortcuts is another beauty of nethack.
Other games try to soothe your brain with beautiful animations and physics emulation. But even in complex modern games the actual amount of actions you can do with given ingame elements is rather limited.

But you already had unnethack running and asked how to get a game rolling.
It is not very fruitful to ask me via dm, since the best thing you can actually learn from nethack is problem solving skills. The cool thing is, those are the same skills you need to get into any computer thingy in depth
And it is so simple, yet a little tedious at first.
Just type everything you have a question about into the nethack wiki. You will get an explanation.

0. Select a character to start a game.
I advise to pick Valkyrie or Barbarian first as they have the highest initial hit/health points.
Male or female, chaotic, neutral or lawful by random since you will learn the impact only muuuch later until you died a lot and started all over anyway

1. Get used to the controls first by navigating through the rooms and paths that are randomly generated once a level is created.
If you hold shift when moving in any direction, you will move until you reach any obstacle. This will speed up things considerably.
The underscore key _ gives a navigate mode. In there you can much like in vim only move the curser over the screen and press . at the place where you want to travel to. Your @ will move there even around corners automagically until you encounter an obstacle.
If doors are locked, #kick them open with ctrl+d.
A stairway down is marked with >. Stand on it and press shift+> to move down a level.

The new level is randomly created when you first step into it and will never exist the same way in another game. Some levels have a fixed layout to do quests (like medusas, the mines town, the castle etc) but those only start after lvl 5.

2. Find food.
One of the challenges in early game is to not starve, so just running around looking for % symbols for food and collecting it is a valid strategy. a food ration gives nutrition for ~500 turns.
You can eat corpses of killed monsters too which is advised but also dangerous because of various side effects. Also eat those corpses within ~40 turns since they will rot and give you food poison.

3. Slay monsters.
To level up experience and get food or random death drop items or the inventory they had, you need to kill monsters.
For that just step into them, you will hit them with your #wield ed weapon.
Since you have a pet cat or dog with a nice AI it is advised to let it kill the more difficult monsters for you. It is a special challenge to keep it at your side and feed it with corpse so it will do so more reliably.

4. Item identifying.
The hardest part of nethack is that every item is randomized in its appearance at game start.
Regardless you learned that a potion of healing gives 10-20 points precious health points back by quaffing it, it will apear as pink, yellow, golden, smoky etc. potion randomly.
The danger is, the green unidentified potion you #quaff to test id it could as well be a potion of polymorph, turning you randomly into e.g a dragon or newt for 500 turns.

That should do for the first hours of dying.
If you really tried, just hook me up with detailed questions if the wiki does not help.

Wow, thanks. It just seems like there is a danger here. I may get hooked on that game. I asked for these Mario kind jumping and Rambo kind shooting games just because I can play randomly and not get hooked. They do not interest me enough but are just some easy access away from this reality.Nethack sees it is another reality and it may force you to stay there because it makes you to use your brains and challenges them.

But thanks for everybody of your tips and instructions. I think I now have enough for now: SuperTux and Frogatti, some puzzle games from mr_pingu, installed some other random games to try. And now nethack as something tempting but not yet daring to enter in.

Still pinball is what I miss the most. And the other is the old game where you move on the bottom of the screen a plate/line and use it to bump a ball to a coloured wall and try to get rid of that wall and sometimes you can get many ball goi around destroing that wall. I think I played it with my friends C64/128 but can't remember the name. That and pinball are games to play on a train or bus or bed at home.

And Numptyphysics, Nobody?
It,s kind of kind of pinball thouh... haem...ok.

Just installed Numpty and tried. Awesome! Thanks. So far Vexed, pool and Numpty are top three for me.

@Maemish

I am a huge pinball fan (real and virtual) and even own a virtual pinball cabinet. I think you should forget about installing a homebrew version. They are just not that much fun and are usually pretty demanding as well.
My advise would be to install picodrive emulator and get the psycho pinball rom. That is imho one of the best virtual pinball games on any console.

It has good physics, pretty accurate aiming (so you need skill not luck), very nice table lay-outs and fun ruleset and even nudging. Psycho table gives access to 3 other tables. Really fun.
Works fine on the N900, just played a decent game without sound (score 44.660.270). Not a lot of glitches or frameskips.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6XmzC_SHU0

Genesis has 100's of games so you can check the library for other types of games as well.

My mum used to be working in the place they make and program these money making machines. Every year they had a family day when we were able to go the factory, play all the games for free and race with electric cars they have in amusement parks. Untill I was 8 I had my own jukebox in my room. But then we moved from a flat to our own big house and funny, my mother said we don't anymore have room to that dust collector jukebox. And when her working place moved they sold all kinds of games and jukeboxes and pinball machines and old computers in a minimum price for workers - and my mom didn't tell me cause "they just collect dust". I have to say I was sometime on a really bad mood after that. I could have got jukeboxes, pinball machines, all coins games and old computers.

When I was working in that factory for summer (cutting with a pedal cutter led wires shorter - working like a machine) they had these poker games there. One man asked if I wanted to play and gave me handfulls 5mark coins which they used for testing. I started to play and was like whaaat? The poker game had only hearts and then you could have also straight or full house or 4 aces. So to start doubling from hearts and fullhouse with a maximum bet you started from 250marks. And the sound of the machine raising for double was insane because of the amounts. The highest double I made was 5 or 7 thousand.

I installed Picodrive, downloaded the psycho pinball and - now I have a pinball! But I have also a problem. Was I aloud to do what I just did in under less than a minute? So am I really aloud to use these roms which I can just download from there? If I am aloud and these other emulators works as well as Picodive - I think I need a bigger sdcard.

I have never been so much into gaming. As a kid yes when I visited my friend, but I didin't have a pc. I bought gameboy when I was 16 I think and played tetris with it. Played so much that got problems: had in college a math exam, looked the paper and thought this is easy. If I turn that clause that way and drop it there then that other clause fits there and... I had being doing that for some time in my mind before understood that I have to calculate, not just turn and drop these.

But yes, haven't really think too much of gaming ever and later started to think it is waste of time. I valued only things that matter and drove my self in a situation where I have been for years: no right for resting or focusing something not worth it. Well I ended up in a panic state some weeks ago and it took three weeks to tget over it. Now I'm fine again, actually better than ever: I don't have stress, I'm not anymore in a rush, and if I close my eyes there is empty instead of stressing videos going on and different projects and tasks urging my attention. And now at last I can value games. I can play games without guilt of doing something pointless and I like this state of mind a lot.

But because I'm a bit moral person I have to deal with that legal side before jumping for joy and diving into the games. Any opinions or advices and the most important side: facts?