OK, I have (with a couple of minor hiccups) downloaded and compiled the source to TinyAngband 0.0.3. It seems, though, that the English translation is not complete - object and terrain feature names still seem to be trying to display in Japanese.

I'm also not quite sure how the pacifist thing would work, with the tagging etc.

The translation seems like kind of a showstopper. Do people think we should try to pursue this for the next comp, or do something else and have Tiny later?

I haven't run 0.0.3 specifically (I've been compiling off the development version), but object names at least certainly shouldn't be trying to display in Japanese.

Did you follow the hints in the Compiling XAngband Source page? In particular failing to delete any .raw files before compiling may cause what you've described.

Aha, thanks - I had configured without --disable-japanese the first time, and saw my mistake on running, but forgot the raw files had been written then.

To answer your other concerns;
I'm quite happy (indeed it would be more convenient) to just have a standard TinyAngband character in standard TinyAngband game for "first to kill Morgoth". (The competition period should be short as it is a 'quick' *band variant).

My thoughts on doing a 'special' were just because there didn't seem to be much interest in 'straight' TinyAngband. I envisage the 'tag' system as a way of getting some exp without having to kill monsters. You get exp for 'seriously disadvantaging' monsters. They don't disappear from the level, and if you encounter them again you don't get extra exp for 'disadvantaging' them again (to prevent farming). You still get full exp if you do kill something (but you will generally want to avoid doing that).

None of the 'special competition features' have been implemented yet (although we do have a good idea of how to do it all, and it shouldn't take long if it goes that way).

I think this might be a better option - especially since TinyAngband is new to pretty much everyone. If you want to send me a savefile, I'll get it organised in the next couple of days.

Will do. Er, pm me your email?

I'll get in contact with iks and update him on developments.

Every spammer on the planet has it already:
nckmccnnll@yahoo.com.au

Should I offer congratulations? :D

Looking at the Competition Rules it suggests that having a 'decent monster memory' is recommended so would a low level knowledge of all monsters be a plus? (iks is going to be handling the save file).

[EDIT] OK, I think we're good to go. I'll email you the save file.

[EDITx2] Apparently the person we were hoping for a OS X binary from is busy this week (and it wasn't as easy as hoped). However there is the following information relayed from iks:

If make and gcc for OSX are installed from OSX CD, OSX binary can be
compiled as follows:
% ./configure --disable-japanese --disable-sdl_mixer; make; make install

X for OSX should be installed from CD.

% ./configure --disable-japanese --disable-sdl-mixer; make; make install

(small typo corrected :)) also works for linux.

PS: X for OSX is now officially part of the OS, and does not need to be installed. (Post 10.4)

Nevertheless, the X version is much uglier and the UI is noticeably worse than OSX native :(

I suppose I should give it a spin. If I like it I can do the port. They don't take more than 2 hours with the current main-crb.c, though the makefile is a bit of a pain for non-portable builds. (ie: makefile.inc and/or makefile.src is not present)