I've recently rediscovered Nethack's IBMgraphics option. When I first played Nethack it was on my DOS 286. It fit entirely on a 720k floppy as I didn't have a hard drive at the time and took about a whole minute to load each time I started. (How's that for a penalty for losing?) When I started playing again in more recent years, I was disapointed that my only options for Nethack visuals were plain text, or DECgraphics. Switching Nethack over to ncurses was a very good thing as it allows better terminal support and finally provided a good way to get color. But now, I've figured out how to get my IBMgraphics back.

Notice here, that the hallways look different. In my opinion they are much better, and lit_corridor (if enabled) actually shows the area around you where you can see stuff.

The Rogue level actually looks like what I remember of IBM Rogue.

Water and lava get a facelift.

So, "How do you make IBMgraphics work?" you may wonder. If you just enable the option on fury it does not display correctly. Here are the steps to make it work (make sure to enable IBMgraphics):

Linux text-mode console:
I don't know if this works with the framebuffer consoles. I've only tested with the plain vanilla mode 3 textmode.

$ charset G0 cp437
$ ssh fury
fury# nethack

xterm:
To make this work in xterm you need to get a vga font. vga11x19 works well for this and if you are a Debian user, it comes packaged with bitchx and some other packages. Assuming you have installed your font, make sure you "xset fp rehash" the first time so X can pick up on it, assuming your config file is correct.

Putty:
In the translation menu, the character set combo box should be set to Codepage 437.