Doom RL might be possible. I didn’t even know it existed until now, and since it’s free, has a 32bit Linux version for download, and seems to use standard SDL stuff, it might work. I’m not sure how playable it will be though as I haven’t played it so I don’t know if there are enough buttons on the Gameshell to map to the game controls. Also, if the game doesn’t allow full screen to fit (shrink) the display on the Gameshell screen, then it won’t be playable. And even if it does work full screen, I’m afraid the text may not be readable based on some of the screenshots on the Doom RL website. But I’ll try it out when I get a chance!
EDIT: Ok, I just tried the windows version to see what the game looked like. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be unplayable on Gameshell even if it does work. The text will be too small to read. I took a few screenshots and shrunk them down to the Gameshell display size and this is what they look like:
And it expects you to be able to type your character name. That’s not going to happen on the Gameshell, unless you have a bluetooth keyboard connected.
Just out of curiosity though, I’ll see if I can get it to run anyway.
EDIT: So it seems to try to start up, but I never get past a black screen. There are lots of options to configure and I forced it to fullscreen, but I didn’t get it to work. I don’t see anything weird in the log so I’m not sure what’s causing it to fail:
05:25:53 : INFO : — Logging start : 28-1-20 05:25:53 —
05:25:53 : REPORT : ---------------------- Compiler info -------------------------
05:25:53 : REPORT : This program was compiled at 13:15:29 on 2013/03/19 by user
05:25:53 : REPORT : Compiler version : 2.6.0
05:25:53 : REPORT : Target OS : Linux
05:25:53 : REPORT : Target CPU : i386
05:25:53 : REPORT : ---------------------- OS runtime Using native(wrapped) libSDL-1.2.so.0
Using native(wrapped) libGL.so.1
Using native(wrapped) libGLU.so.1
Using native(wrapped) libSDL_image-1.2.so.0
-28-2020 05:25:53
05:25:53 : INFO : Root path set to -
05:25:53 : INFO : <TDoom//0> Initialized.
05:25:53 : INFO : <TDoom//0> 0.9.9.7
05:25:53 : INFO : DoomNet: downloading doom.chaosforge.net/info.xml to info.xml…
05:25:53 : INFO : HTTP/1.1 403 Forbidden
05:25:53 : INFO : DoomNet: EHTTPError caught - GET doom.chaosforge.net /info.xml - 403 Forbidden
05:25:53 : INFO : Remote stable - 0.0.0 ()
05:25:53 : INFO : Remote beta - 0.0.0 ()
05:25:53 : INFO : MOTD - Could not connect to ChaosForge server!
05:25:53 : INFO : DoomModules loading…
05:25:53 : INFO : DoomModules loaded.
05:25:53 : INFO : Initializing SDL…
05:25:53 : INFO : Checking mode 320x240/32bit…
05:25:52 : INFO : Mode 320x240/32 set.
05:25:52 : INFO : SDL IO system
Ancient Domain of Mystery is commercial and I don’t own it so I don’t really have a way to test that. Based on the screenshots though, it seems like it would need a larger display (they claim 800x600 on Steam). And since it’s Steam, it will almost certainly suffer from the same problem all the Steam games suffer from – the DRM won’t work. So far no Steam games work with box86, but ptitSeb mentioned a while back that he was making progress getting Steam to work under it. If there was a Humble Bundle or DRM-free version of the game, it might work, but like I say the display probably wouldn’t fit the Gameshell anyway.
Nethack and Angband are available on Debian so they could be installed directly with apt-get install.
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=nethack
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=angband
The thing is, the early (and most modern) roguelikes are meant to be played with a keyboard. And we don’t have a keyboard built into the Gameshell. We’ve pretty much got a d-pad and 7 buttons (shift doesn’t count). With the shift key we also have access to a slightly more awkward total of 17 buttons and the d-pad. The lightkey (which I’ve not used yet since I felt like it would be even more awkward) give only another 4 buttons since they repeated the shift key, and reused 4 of the other button assignments. So at most, even with the lightkey, you’ll have 21 buttons plus the D-pad to use. I guess that’s actually a lot of buttons, but remembering what is mapped to what for a roguelike sounds like it would be a challenge!
Another thing about the classic text based roguelikes is they generally use text characters for the display, and it might not be possible to fit that much text on the screen and still be able to tell what is what.
Ooops, looks like others already said a lot of that here:
Powder should work ok on Gameshell though, as I don’t think it uses that many buttons and it has graphics that would fit on the display with @r043v’s port.