Error-prone Adom

[Phoobnahr]

I've played Adom for about 10 years, but of late I've been having such a bad problem losing characters to errors that I'm starting to lose the heart to go on.

In the many years before i counted my first victory I think I maybe lost one character to a fatal error, but since getting my victory about six months ago, I seem positively riddled with errors. I have a very promising troll merchant who is backed up, but due to errors I'm facing the necessity of clearing the griffyard, arena, ogre halls and pyramid for the third time, and it's just been too disheartening to continue.
I took a long break, and came back to ADOM over the last week, only to have my gnome archer, Hornberger, be permanently lost to an error, due to the fact that I haven't played in awhile and am no longer in the habit of making backups...

I've been told before that by playing on the server I can have the option of regular automatic backups, but I wonder if there's not a slightly more stable basic install I could be using... right now I have the winbeta4

[Exy]

I don't know if anyone's really tested this enough to be sure, but my experience suggests that the Winbetas are buggier than the other versions -- things seemed to go much better when I switched to Sage. A lot of people use the Winbetas but it seems to me like most of those people have way more frequent game-ending bugs than I do (I can think of only one serious adom bug I've had in recent memory, and even that was one of the ones where it crashed until you got off the level but then worked fine). So, obviously I strongly recommend using Sage instead. I'm not sure about its compatibility with different Windows versions, but it's what I used when I used WinXP and it's still what I use on Linux, and I don't have anywhere near the level of annoyance you describe. I believe it works on post-XP versions of Windows, but I can't say for sure.

[anon123]

Some people have reported that the Windows version of ADOM Sage is pretty stable. Savegames will be compatible with it if you don't change the terminal size. If you want to play the same build the server ran (with automatic backups), check the second link in my signature.

I personally use winbeta4 because it's the most fluid one in my very old computer, so I try to make backups regularly.

[Dervi]

I've always played the DOS version on Windows and never got any crash except upon entering the Casino level (that's why you make backups). However, I just found out after downloading the old ADOM111.zip file for DOS on my new Win7 PC that it has become unplayable with a non-english keyboard...

[Grey]

Sage with the Linux version has always been very stable to me, whilst also having numerous nice advantages

[JellySlayer]

Consider donating to TB's funding campaign to fix the game.