screen size question

[Sian]

just managed to get ADOM to work on my labtop (problems with keys beforehand) but would like to change the screensize from the small way it is currently, to a bigger way (so there's several more titles in both directions) ... anyone remember how its done ... i've done it earlier on my stationary, but that have crashed so i'm unable to salvage how it did from that

[Conundrum]

AFAIK it's impossible to make the game display more tiles, you can only increase the size of the tiles. Also, why would you need to display more tiles? The game map and all dungeon levels fit exactly to the default 80x25 size, so you wouldn't view any more information by getting more tiles anyway.

[gut]

I think he means the trick that gets you a
bigger casino. I haven't explored how to do
that in vista yet, shouldn't be too hard though.
Maybe I'll experiment a bit later...

[Al-Khwarizmi]

Of course you can get more tiles, and it's really easy, at least in windows! Look at the screenshot. It's on windowed mode. You can also play bigger levels on fullscreen DOS mode, although I don't have a program that can make a screenshot of that right now.

In windowed mode, it's as easy as taking the window and resizing it. In DOS mode, there is a "mode" command that configures the number of rows and columns: http://www.dewassoc.com/support/msdos/mode.htm (be aware that not all the possible numbers that you can use there are legal).

I used to play in 80x50 mode all the time some years ago, not because I wanted to cheat or have a bigger casino or anything, but just because I had MS-DOS configured that way for everything (I actually used DOS at that time); and also because I preferred the large, intrincate, more square levels that ADOM generates at that mode. I only switched to playing in 80x25 when I found rec.games.roguelike.adom some years ago and I found out that everyone was playing in that mode and some recording program (don't remember which) only supported that.

The game in 80x50 mode is totally different, I wouldn't be able to say if easier or harder. Some things are harder: exploring levels to dive fast is much harder, and you get significantly more problems with starvation in the early game. Corruption seems to be also more of a problem, probably just because you have to take longer walks for everything. However, monster density is smaller, so it seems to be harder to get surrounded.

For all those of you that have finished the game, made ultras and all that I suggest to try it, since it's a totally different experience. I'm very surprised that this is not well known, as for me it was something natural and obvious from my very beginnings with this game!