The Second Maintainer

Charles Swiger, an interested coder, took over in late 1993, and cleaned up code, fixed bugs and incorporated various patches, starting with Angband 2.5.0 (November 1993), and finishing with Angband 2.6.1. It took ideas from newsgroups, UMoria 5.5, PC Angband, and the first real variant, FAngband.

Angband 2.6.1 was primarily targetted towards Unix machines, and required a toolkit called "curses" which displayed and manipulated the contents of the screen, and dealt with keypresses from the user. For each release, non-Unix ports had to be updated from scratch, usually by writing code which emulated the functionality of the "curses" toolkit.

In late 1994, Charles Swiger announced that he was starting a real job and would no longer be able to be the Angband maintainer. This induced some amount of uproar in the Angband community, with various people attempting to form committees to take over the maintenance of Angband. There was, for example, a release of Angband 2.6.2 by Randy Hutson, which added various patches, but this proved to be a dead end.