[GAMES] Figuring out your saved Nethack character name on Windows

One of my coworkers is a dual major in computer science and game design, and recently we've been talking about some of the games that set the groundwork for the games we know today. He started talking about the game Rogue and the games that built off of it, called "roguelikes". Basically, they're text-based dungeon crawling games with randomized dungeons and permanent death. Diablo was actually heavily influenced (according to the developers) by the most popular roguelike, NetHack.

Of course, I had to try it out, and now I'm pretty much addicted.

But this post isn't about my propensity for gaming addiction, it's to actually provide some useful information. I got the furthest I'd ever been last night and saved and went to bed.

The problem is that I couldn't remember my character name. I'd started and died so many times I was just hitting random keys for name creation. However, you can look at the save file and figure out your character name.

On Windows XP at least, it will be saved into the same directory as the NetHack executable. The file format is

WINDOWS_USERNAME-charname.sav

For example,

Administrator-AwesomeValkyrie.sav

Just type in "AwesomeValkyrie" in the load screen and you're all set!

I hope that helps someone out there who looked up the solution to this problem and only ran into *nix answers :-)