Intle: Wordle for Intellivision

[Peripheral]

A very cool game!

 

I know you expressed a desire to not keep enhancing this, but I can dream can't I?

 

Would be nice if there was also a cursor over the guess, to make it easy to correct just one or two letters

without having to re-enter the entire word.  I find myself doing this when guessing a word like TULIP or

MOLAR, which is not recognized.  You could use the keypad for left/right movement of this cursor ('4' and '6').

 

Is it possible for you to simply release the source code?  That would allow this wonderful community

to contribute more features/words.

[+cmadruga]

9 hours ago, Peripheral said:

A very cool game!

 

I know you expressed a desire to not keep enhancing this, but I can dream can't I?

 

Would be nice if there was also a cursor over the guess, to make it easy to correct just one or two letters

without having to re-enter the entire word.  I find myself doing this when guessing a word like TULIP or

MOLAR, which is not recognized.  You could use the keypad for left/right movement of this cursor ('4' and '6').

 

Is it possible for you to simply release the source code?  That would allow this wonderful community

to contribute more features/words.

 

Sure, here's the source. Keep in mind this was something done very quickly.

Have fun!

 

intle01182021.bas

[+nanochess]

On 1/21/2022 at 10:36 PM, cmadruga said:

 

Sure, here's the source. Keep in mind this was something done very quickly.

Have fun!

 

intle01182021.bas 66.1 kB · 3 downloads

I'm pretty impressed it contains a 2500 word list.

 

Kudos! ?

 

Edited January 23, 2022 by nanochess

[Peripheral]

Here's a version with 5329 words.

 

I generated all 26 to the 5th combinations of five letters and ran it through spell to filter out bad words.

 

Interestingly, 178 of the original 2499 words were not recognized by my cygwin spell.  But I left them in the game,

as they are probably UK variants or some such.  These words are listed in the orignotspell.txt attachment.

 

If you want to add/remove words to the intle5329.bas source, be sure to also change the NUM_WORDS constant

at the beginning of the file.

 

 

intle5329.bas intle5329.rom orignotspell.txt

[+cmadruga]

Nice upgrade!

 

 

[Brian's Man Cave]

Still can't get this to work..   Must be missing something in my JZINTV set up?? 

 

 

Compatibility:
  ECS                    Requires
  Intellivoice           Tolerates
  Intellivision II       Tolerates
  Keyboard Component     Tolerates
  TutorVision            Tolerates
JLP Support:
  JLP Accel              Disabled
  JLP Flash Sectors      0

ECS ROM: No such file or directory
ERROR:  Could not read ECS ROM image 'ecs.bin'

[+cmadruga]

Try running it with -s0 or just double check if ecs.bin is in place. This rom does not require ECS.

[Peripheral]

Another update.

 

Fixed a bug where you were erroneously allowed to enter a 4 letter word (hmm, that doesn't sound good  ) instead of 5.

 

Also took the opportunity to add a couple more features.

First, pressing keypad #2 toggles blinking of the keyboard cursor.  I found the blinking a bit distracting.

Second, pressing keypad #0 after your first guess (before hitting Enter) makes your guessed word be

the hidden word, and disables verifying guesses exist in the dictionary.  This is for development purposes,

allowing you to easily test the coloring algorithm for words with repeated letters.

 

And, I couldn't resist polishing some of the code.

 

Enjoy.

 

 

intlev4.rom intlev4.bas

[First Spear]

Added some sound and some simple music.

intlev4a.rom

intlev4a.bas

[+cmadruga]

Looks like we are not the only ones porting it to retro platforms... even though we may have been the pioneers.

 

 

[carlsson]

Jeff Minter pointed out that the same type of word game has existed on the C64 for 30 years or so, but of course nobody cared until a few months ago.

[+cmadruga]

25 minutes ago, carlsson said:

Jeff Minter pointed out that the same type of word game has existed on the C64 for 30 years or so, but of course nobody cared until a few months ago.

What's the name?

[carlsson]

Perhaps not all of these meet the Wordle qualities, in particular not those without a word list so you're guessing random combinations of letters:

 

Codewoord (Commodore Info 1986) - four letter codes, not real words

Lingo (public domain 1988) - seems to allow non-word guesses

Lingo (Commodore Info 1990) - a bit plain in presentation

Lingos (unpublished 1994) - again, allows non-word guesses

Lingo (unpublished 1995) - different from the above

Fünf mal fünf (public domain 1997) - simple presentation, allows non-word guesses

Linko (GO64! 2002) - not sure if this one prevents non-words

 

As a bonus, I found Jot-a-Word Genie (BCI Software 1983) which I'm not sure how it works if both the player and the computer are guessing at the same time.

 

So yes, the sleek presentation plus the checking input against a word list might be what makes Wordle a new thing but the idea of a letter based Mastermind goes back 30++ years.

[+cmadruga]

I think the check against a word list is a small, but significant difference.

Makes the game less dry and abstract, and brings in a general knowledge / memorization element that is much more interesting.

[roots.genoa]

1 hour ago, carlsson said:

Jeff Minter pointed out that the same type of word game has existed on the C64 for 30 years or so, but of course nobody cared until a few months ago.

I'm not surprised since it's based on a game created in the 50s, that became a TV show called Lingo in most countries. Apparently the games you mentioned are based on it.

Edited February 14, 2022 by roots.genoa

[carlsson]

Just like Carlos pointed out above, I suppose the key point is whether ther game - manual or electronic - requires that every guess is a valid word or if you simply can input any row of letters and get a score back. When we play Bulls & Cows or Mastermind with numbers or coloured pegs, that never is an issue because all numbers are valid whether they're 12345, 47229 or 95831 and the same about combinations of colours. Only in the case we substitute those ~6 different colours or 10 different numbers for an alphabet of 26+ different letters (depending on language), we get the new feature of checking input against a word list.

 

Some people have joked that Chinese Wordle is no fun, under the assumption that the word you're guessing is only one pictogram and there are thousands to choose from. I suppose it is possible to that even in languages not based on the Latin alphabet or a variant thereof.

[ClassicGMR]

So I just popped this into Nintellivision DS v3.4 and it works like a dream. Excellent game @cmadruga! Also thank you for releasing the source so things could be added. Not a lot of people like to do that with their creations even if they've gone as far as they want to with the code. I personally appreciate that and the touches added by @Peripheral and @First Spear

Edited February 14, 2022 by ClassicGMR

[+cmadruga]

12 minutes ago, ClassicGMR said:

So I just popped this into Nintellivision DS v3.4 and it works like a dream. Excellent game @cmadruga! Also thank you for releasing the source so things could be added. Not a lot of people like to do that with their creations even if they've gone as far as they want to with the code. I personally appreciate that and the touches added by @Peripheral and @First Spear

Glad you liked it!

[RevEng]

4 hours ago, carlsson said:

So yes, the sleek presentation plus the checking input against a word list might be what makes Wordle a new thing but the idea of a letter based Mastermind goes back 30++ years.

It's not just the word checking. The fact that everybody gets just one crack at the new word each day, and it's the same word for everybody, makes it a shared event. Add in easy spoiler-free sharing of your achievement on social media, and you have the main reasons why it caught fire.

 

If it was just a word guess game like the others, without these features, nobody would be playing it.

[Peripheral]

On 2/13/2022 at 8:09 PM, First Spear said:

Added some sound and some simple music.

intlev4a.rom 47.58 kB · 7 downloads

intlev4a.bas 145.71 kB · 2 downloads

Well done!

 

I like the blips when moving the cursor around the keyboard.

 

But I'm not a big fan of background music (not just for this game, but for most games).

So if you could add a key press to toggle that on/off, that would be super (but keep the keyboard blips).

 

One other thing I discovered is that proper names are not recognized.  I hit this with "Venus".

 

When I ran my five-letter words through spell, I used all lower case.  Apparently you have to capitalize the first letter

to get spell to recognize more valid words.  That would add another 1295 words to our dictionary.  I haven't tried doing

so yet, but suspect I'd start running into "ASM ORG" segment limits, and might need a more efficient word packing mechanism.

 

Doing a little investigation into what words Wordle treats as valid, I came across an article

that suggests Wordle accepts at least some proper names.  I can't find that article right now,

but I thought it also said Wordle's dictionary only has about 2500 words, and that the English language

has about 12,000 words.  So we're unlikely to get them all in anyway.

 

I'm not committing to anything, but here are some other tweaks

I've considered playing around with:

 

1) Delay selection of the hidden word until after the first word is guessed.

    This would give the random number generator more time to cycle through

    its pattern, and thus improve randomization.  This hasn't been a huge

    problem for me, but at least once I've hit a word I had played before.

 

2) Lay out the keyboard (perhaps under a toggle-able option) similar to the qwerty layout.

    Ironically, I find the qwerty layout harder to use to play the game, but on the other hand,

    it matches the online version more accurately.

 

3) When coloring the letters, just color the foreground, and leave the background black.

    Not a big deal, just think it might look nicer.

 

4) Perhaps use keypad #4 and #6 as 'move the keyboard cursor left/right a handful (6 or 7) of positions'.

    This would ease moving far distances.

[+cmadruga]

It should be possible to add more words using more than one segment. 

However, you may need to optimize the search logic if it gets too slow to lookup words.

About #2, I had QWERTY originally, but thought that finding the letters was not as easy. So I switched to the current layout.

 

On #3, I think background colors are more easily identifiable.

[+DZ-Jay]

19 hours ago, RevEng said:

It's not just the word checking. The fact that everybody gets just one crack at the new word each day, and it's the same word for everybody, makes it a shared event. Add in easy spoiler-free sharing of your achievement on social media, and you have the main reasons why it caught fire.

Well, to be fair, it was actually helped by a few very popular celebrities promoting it to their followers.  Without that, it would probably remain as obscure as any other random puzzle game out there (hint: there are lots).

 

Then, once it went "viral," as it were, people noticed and even people in this community found the interest and motivation to make a clone.  I doubt that would have happen otherwise, no matter how novel or interesting the "shared event" concept would be.

 

Of course, it helps if the game is interesting and challenging and slick to being with; but I find the hysteria that some newspapers and websites out there have exhibited over the game, just way over the top.

 

     -dZ.

 

[RevEng]

Yeah, I don't disagree with your points. But without the shared-event and social media aspects, I don't think it would have even had critical mass for celebrity shares. Would it have gotten as big without celebrities on-board? Probably not. Would it languish in obscurity? I'm not as sure.

 

1 hour ago, DZ-Jay said:

Of course, it helps if the game is interesting and challenging and slick to being with; but I find the hysteria that some newspapers and websites out there have exhibited over the game, just way over the top.

Completely agreed. But, I think it's safe to say that about pretty much any viral topic.

[+Steve Jones]

I missed whatever celebrity first made it popular, I actually heard about it from my 82 year old aunt in England, now my brother and I play with her and my mother, and my aunt consistantly beats us all. Keeps us all in contact every day, even if its just briefly.

[Peripheral]

I couldn't resist my itch to add new features, so here it is, intlev5!

 

I added the additional proper names, giving a total word count of 6624.

Be warned, some of these additional names I've found very challenging.

I also changed the word packing to use two decles instead of three.

 

I delayed selection of the hidden word until absolutely needed,

which hopefully improves its randomness.

 

 

I also changed the exists-in-dictionary verification to use a binary search,

so it's blink-of-an-eye fast now.

 

Keypad #3 now toggles the background music on/off.

I'm about as far away from an expert as you can get

regarding IntyBASIC music controls, so I'm crossing

my fingers that this was done correctly.  It seems to

work OK, and maintains its state across games.

 

To recap, here are all of the controls:

 

DISC:  move the keyboard cursor one position (well, two if diagonal)

any action button:  assign current keyboard letter to the current guess

keypad Enter: verify the current guess

keypad Clear: Erase last letter in current guess

keypad #1:  give a tip (gives you one letter that exists somewhere in the word)

keypad #2:  toggle blinking of the keyboard cursor

keypad #3:  toggle background music on/off

keypad #4:  move keyboard cursor left 6 positions, with wrap-around

keypad #6:  move keyboard cursor right 6 positions, with wrap-around

keypad #7:  move keyboard cursor to leftmost position

keypad #9:  move keyboard cursor to rightmost position

keypad #0:  use after first guess, before Enter, to make your guess be

                   the hidden word, and disable dictionary verification.

 

Enjoy

intlev5.rom intlev5.bas