Two recent happenings in the roguelike world have brought the Roguelike Gallery some attention.
Linux Journal
The June issue of Linux Magazine ran an article on dgamelaunch which mentions the Roguelike Gallery. It gives a tutorial on how to create your own dgamelaunch installation.
The article quotes my claim that "Rogue first ran under the V6 Unix operating system on the DEC PDP-11 minicomputer." A reader wrote in with some corrections which the author forwarded to me. The part about PDP-11 hardware is easy to support. The Roguelike Restoration Project pages for Rogue 3.4 and Rogue 3.6 describe the game as "probably developed on a PDP 11/70". This could be verified by downloading the BSD archives which those pages reference from Marshall Kirk McKusick's site and checking that the executables are PDP-11 binaries.
The question of what operating system Rogue ran on is more complicated. It was 3BSD which first included a rewritten kernel to make better use of the VAX's virtual memory features. At the time Rogue was created, 2BSD seems to have been mainly a collection of userspace software that ran on top of Research UNIX. So the software plaform could be correctly described as either Research UNIX or BSD. However, I had no real support for the claim that the Research UNIX edition was v6. So I have changed the Rogue V3 article to refer to "an early version of the BSD Unix operating system".
Roguelike Celebration
Last month, the annual Roguelike Celebration took place virtually. John Harris of @Play fame gave a talk on the "Lost Roguelikes", Super-Rogue, Advanced Rogue, XRogue, and UltraRogue. There was a lot of information on the history and features of these games. The presentation also included a discussion and demonstration of Larn.
At the end of the talk, it became obvious that the Roguelike Gallery needs to make it easier for people to get in touch and contribute. I have added contact information to the About page. I also intend to install some bug-tracking tools to make reporting problems easier.
The original talk (which John Harris has since corrected) confused the Roguelike Gallery with the Roguelike Restoration Project Fork, which was another effort to carry on the work of the Roguelike Restoration Project. The RRPF was operated by coredumpcentral.org from 2010 to 2014, and was never associated with the Roguelike Gallery.
Upcoming Improvements
The Roguelike Celebration motivated me to pick up UltraRogue and try to finish off its list of outstanding bugs. Unfortunately, as soon as I began looking at the code, I began finding more problems. I'm still hoping to have it available for play in a few months.