CardboardBox

It's working the way Wordle works. Since there's only one E in CYCLE, only one E gets colored.

Yup, I just added version 1.3 which adds the distribution on the title screen, complete with a bar graph. Use joystick left & right to switch between different stats. It looks like this: The only other change should be that the yellow is a different yellow.

Added version 1.2 Changes: - I changed the memory layout of SaveKey data so unfortunately anyone who has played version 1.1 will lose their progress (v1.1 only came out yesterday so hopefully this isn't a huge deal for anyone) - Added the ability to clear all SaveKey data by holding reset and select and pressing fire 10 times. - Current streak is now also saved on the SaveKey, so long as you don't press reset or turn off the console in the middle of a round - a key next to your streak indicates it's safe to turn off or reset. - Current streak and best streak are now 4 digits instead of 2. - When you reach your best streak, your streak turns yellow/gold. - Pressing Reset now goes back to the title screen instead of resetting the gameplay screen.

Not your bad, the 1.1 version hadn't been posted yet Not saving the current streak is by design, but the design might be bad. I didn't want you to be able to turn off the Atari once you get to the 6th guess to avoid losing your streak. I guess I could make it so it saves if you haven't made a guess yet. Or save the entire game state. Or just let cheaters cheat. ? I could make room for number of wins with 1-6 tries if I removed the "PRESS FIRE!" message when the SaveKey is plugged in. Also maybe I should allow your streak to go over 99 (currently it just changes to ?? at 100). Though I might not be able to display the max streak on the gameplay screen if I did.

Left difficulty should be fixed in the new version (1.1). SaveKey support is also added, though I don't have an address allocated so it's using an address allocated as scratch space for now, so other games might interfere with it. I ended up having to change the dictionary to be delta encoded to make room. Also the scoring system is replaced with just tracking your streak like Wordle does.

Oh I think I might have gotten the difficulty switch backwards. Right/B is supposed to be the easier difficulty and Left/A is supposed to be the harder one, right? I'll fix that in the next build.

Good idea, I'll see if I can squeeze in SaveKey support. I hadn't seen that Wordle tracks your current streak, I never paid attention to those stats. That makes me want to remove the current scoring mechanism and just give 1 point per word to make it the same as Wordle's streak. Then saving your high score on the SaveKey would be equivalent to Wordle's max streak.

Added a new version. - Changed list of 2048 words that can be picked as a solution. I replaced a lot of obscure words with more common ones. - Modified the logo and added a version number on the title screen - Made the music loop longer. - Merged in the fix for the Flashback Portable I've completed all the items on my todo list so I'm calling this version 1.0. I'm still open to suggestions if anyone has them.

Added version 0.3. Changes: - Added Hard Mode which can be controlled via the left difficulty switch. Right difficulty switch now controls how all guesses are initialized, instead of splitting first guess and subsequent guesses on left/right difficulty switches. - When a guess is invalid because of a previous guess (either due to hard mode or a duplicate guess), the previous guess is highlighted along with the invalid guess. - On the final guess, the music stops and the colors reveal slower for dramatic effect.

I'm guessing from Nukey Shay's comments this won't actually fix the issue, but it's worth a try. This just uses the background color instead of the playfield color, in hopes that mid-line background color changes might be supported better by the Flashback Portable. If this doesn't fix it then it might just be impossible. word_guess_bg_test.bin

Player 0 graphics (C, R, A) are also misplaced horizontally. So RESP0 and/or HMP0/HMOVE are also not working properly. They're placed correctly in the score though. I think the playfield colors line up exactly with transitions between PF1 and PF2. And they're not a multiple of 3 pixels so they can't be determined entirely by CPU timing. This makes me think each part of playfield (PF0, PF1, PF2) can only be a single color. Then maybe it could be fixed by swapping background and playfield, assuming changes to the background color work as expected. Edit: this quote seems to indicate the background color does NOT work as expected ?

If the playfield color updates are delayed that much it's going to be impossible to have a single kernel that works on both the 2600 and the Flashback Portable, but it might be possible to have a separate build. I can try making a build this weekend with earlier COLUPF writes.

Is it off by a full letter column? Like C R A T E would become C R A T E ? Or just 1 playfield column? I don't have a Flashback Portable so I'm not sure I'll be able to fix it. The only option that seems to affect anything is "Delayed playfield / Color" which looks like this. ComputerSpaceFan's description sounds like the colors would be more offset.

I added a PAL60 version, along with a title screen and music which can be toggled with the color switch. English is my first language and I didn't know "RAJAH" either, but it's from the original Wordle list. I might change the list of allowed solutions at some point 'cause some of them are pretty obscure.

I've implemented some suggestions made: - Reset resets the game. - Select sets the selected tile to A. - Difficulty switches control how guesses are initialized. P1 controls first guess (same as last round or AAAAA). P2 controls subsequent guesses (same as previous guess or AAAAA). - Repeating the same guess is now disallowed to prevent accidental guesses. Also, you can now swap letters by holding fire, moving left/right, then releasing fire. This helps speed up input when you get a lot of yellows. word_guess_v0.1.bin

Thanks for the suggestions, I'll probably incorporate all of them. I agree it doesn't need a score, but I personally like making the number go up. Though maybe just a count of how many words you got in a row would be better. Edit: Other languages could be simple if they don't have accents. Including accents would take a lot of work. Thanks! The letters are just single-width, that's how. They're 8 clocks wide and 21 scanlines tall. It currently uses almost the same word lists as Wordle, with the solutions list trimmed down to 2048 words. The dictionary is broken down into chunks based on the first two letters, so each word in the chunk only needs to include the last 3 letters. Those 3 letters take 15 bits and a 16th bit indicates whether the word can be the solution, meaning each word takes 2 bytes. Then it has a 26^2-entry table to lookup where each chunk is. Each chunk is sorted alphabetically so words can be quickly checked with a binary search. To speed up picking the solution word, it also has a table of how many solutions are in each 256-byte page of data, so to find the nth solution it can first find which page it will appear in then scan through the page. It's definitely possible to compress it further, but I was mostly concerned with getting it to be playable on my Harmony cart. I agree, the keyboard on yours is very nice! I originally planned to have a keyboard similar to yours, but when I made the letters big I liked the way it looked and there was no longer room for a keyboard. Maybe the aesthetics aren't worth it though ?‍♂️

I decided to port Wordle to the Atari 2600. I've currently implemented all the features I wanted to but I'm open to suggestions. Instructions: The computer secretly picks a word. You have 6 guesses to find the secret word. After you make a guess, each letter tile will change color to indicate if it matches the secret word. Green means the letter matches and is in the correct position. Yellow means the letter matches but is in the wrong position. Grey means the letter doesn't match. Controls: Left/Right: Select letter tile. Up/Down: Change Letter of selected tile. Press Fire: Make a guess Hold Fire, move Left/Right, Release Fire: Swap 2 letters Select: Reset selected letter tile to "A". Reset: Go back to the title screen. P1 Difficulty: Right = Normal Mode, Left = Hard Mode. On hard mode, guesses must agree with the colors of previous guesses. P2 Difficulty: Change how each guess is initialized - Right = Use previous guess, Left = use "AAAAA" Color Switch: Toggle Music - Color = On, B/W = Off If you have a SaveKey, the title screen will show number of words won, number of words played, current streak, best streak, and distribution of how many guesses it took to win. Use left & right on the joystick to navigate between the different stats. To delete your SaveKey data, hold reset and select and press fire 10 times. Note: since I don't have a spot allocated on the SaveKey yet, it uses a page allocated for scratch space, and thus may be overwritten if another game uses the same page. Warning: If you press reset or turn off the Atari in the middle of a round you will lose you current streak. A key next to your score indicates it is safe to power off the console. Edit: I now see I'm not the first to do this! I hadn't seen VCS Words until after I posted this. Download: word_guess_v1.3.bin ? NTSC word_guess_v1.3_PAL60.bin ? PAL60 Play on Javatari Old Versions:

Good news, I have a real Atari 2600 now and I was able to diagnose and fix the line count issues in screen transitions (I had an accidental write to RSYNC). My RetroTink 2X Mini can handle the transitions fine now, so hopefully other similar devices will work too. Here's the updated ROM. If I don't find any issues with this build it might be the final version. I have 1 0 bytes of free space and getting diminishing returns on finding bytes to save. DigiBeatz_0.4.1.bin

I've updated the game with the following changes since it was posted: version 0.1: - Removed purple rectangle indicating miss - Fixed line count issues in screen transitions (Stella says everything is always 262 now ) version 0.2: - P2 difficulty switch controls controller mode - B for joystick, A for Track and Field Controller - Pressing fire moves down on the song selection screen so the Track and Field controller can be used. - P1 difficulty switch controls song tempo - B for normal, A for fast (Spinning joystick no longer increases song tempo, to make room for track and field controller mode). - Health bar flashes red when a note is missed - Poor judgement decreases health by 2 instead of increasing by 1 (to discourage mashing on the track and field controller). - Miss decreases health by 4 instead of 5. I also attempted to add a song progress bar but failed. I have one more idea to try for that but I'm not sure I can fit it on the cart. version 0.3: - Added progress meter Edit: Oops, version 0.2 had 263 scanlines every time your score passes a multiple of 10,000. Replaced with version 0.2.1 which fixes this and is otherwise the same. Edit2: Got the progress meter to work, updated to version 0.3 Edit3: Oops, version 0.3 had 263 scanlines every 2nd frame during the failure animation. Fixed in version 0.3.1 which also has minor UI improvements (gradient text, more accurate progress meter) New version in case you don't want to scroll up: DigiBeatz_0.3.1.bin

I've uploaded the tracks to soundcloud with downloads enabled, re-rendered with higher sample rate than in-game (44.1kHz instead of 3.9kHz) and in stereo. In theory if you play this in mono is what it would sound like if I could update AUDV0 2.8 times per scanline instead of once every 4 scanlines.

Hello everyone! I made a game and wanted to share. DigiBeatz is a 4KiB rhythm game for the Atari 2600 that features software-generated sound to split the console's 2 audio channels into 5. It contains 7 originally composed tracks, each with 5 charts of varying difficulty. After selecting a chart, notes will begin falling from the top of the screen towards the targets at the bottom. Before the note reaches the target, position the joystick so the corresponding target is highlighted - left, right or center. Then press fire right when the note overlaps the target. If the note is hit successfully, a color will flash at the bottom indicating how well the note was timed. Green means perfect timing: +100 points, +1 health. Yellow means good timing: 50 points, +1 health. Red means poor timing: 20 points, -2 health. If your health flashes red, it means the note was missed: 0 points, -4 health. If your health reaches 0, it's game over. Setting the Player 1 difficulty switch to A increases the tempo of all songs. Setting the Player 2 difficulty switch to A changes the game to work with the Track and Field controller. When a note reaches the targets, the corresponding button on the controller should be pressed. Note: I've tested this on Stella and Javatari but I have neither an Atari 2600 nor a flash cart to try it on (yet!), so I would appreciate if someone was able to confirm if it works on original hardware. Edit: I have an Atari 2600 now, and with my latest changes I can run it through my RetroTink 2X Mini without cutting out from line count/vsync issues. Here's a recording I captured of all the tracks with assorted charts: DigiBeatz_0.4.1.bin