W O R D L E [DONE]

[+mksmith]

Welcome to W O R D L E for the Atari 7800!

Concept by Josh Wardle

THIS RELEASE IS FREE TO THE COMMUNITY AND IS NOT TO BE COMMERCIALLY SOLD FOR PROFIT

 

About

Guess the WORDLE in 6 tries.

Each guess must be a valid 5 letter word. Hit the enter button to submit.

After each guess, the color of the tiles will change to show how close your guess was to the word.

 

The game contains the 2,315 wordles! and the 10,657 allowed entry dictionaries from the original.

 

PLAY ONLINE (thanks raz0red!)

 

Playing the game

• Using the joystick, paddles or keypad move the cursor to select a letter from the on-screen keyboard and press the left fire button to add your letter to the active word.
• Once you have entered 5 letters select the Tick function from the keyboard and press the left fire button to validate.
• To remove a letter select the Del function from the on-screen keyboard and press the left fire button or press the right fire button.

Note: The on-screen keyboard keeps track of letters in the correct spot (green), incorrect spot (brown) and not in the wordle (gray)

 

Features

• Statistics summary
• Hard mode, show wordle (for uncompleted game) or any word entries (in settings)
• SaveKey/AtariVox/High Score Cart support to store statistics
• Multiple controller support joystick, paddles and keypad

 

Controls

To change the available controls, on the Title screen press the Select button to cycle through the available options:

• Joystick (left)
• Paddles (left)
• Keypad (left) - 2 (up), 8 (down), 4 (left), 6 (right), hash (button 1), star (button 2)
• Joystick (left)/Paddles (right)
• Joystick (left)/Keypad (right)

These options will still allow SaveKey/AtariVox/High Score Cart users to store their data.

 

Feedback

If you have any suggestions or feedback please raise them below!

 

Thanks

As always thanks to Mike @RevEng for the dictionary randomiser selection code and Lewis @Muddyfunster and Bobby @Synthpopalooza for the additional control suggestions.

 

Atari Homebrew Awards Nomination

W O R D L E 7800 has been nominated for the best homebrew conversion at the 5th Annual Atari Homebrew Awards 👏👏👏

 

Releases

20220308.wordle.a78

If you are using the BupSystem emulator (or don't care about saved storage) use this release:

20220308.wordle.nosavekey.a78

Older

20220220.wordle.a78

20220222.wordle.nosavekey.a78

20220219.wordle.a78

20220213.wordle.a78

20220206.wordle.a78

20220205.wordle.a78

20220203.wordle.a78

 

Title

 

Statistics

SaveKey/AtariVox/High Score Cart support will allow you to keep your statistics with the ability to reset them via the menu (select and hold fire)

 

[+groundtrooper]

@Dauber

@ferghead

[+mksmith]

There is some nice coding challenges in this one. The 'underthehood' (UTH) code has once again come to the fore with this project.

 

Having each letter in the on-keyboard a different colour was an interesting challenge to sort out. The UTH palette command updates the right item in the zone to the required color. The keyboard is drawn with plotmap with individual rows stored in Ram.

 

Flipping the tiles for a validated word replaces the image and palette in the UTH commands. The words themselves are just a string stored in Ram and drawing to the screen.

 

When you when enter an incorrect/invalid word the line shakes. This shifts all the objects in the zone left and right a single pixel (could be more) using some code I created with the UTH method. I also used this in RobotsRumble for the scroller.

 

Mike's randomiser finds the right position amoungst the stored 2500 words are copies the letters into Ram.

[+cjherr]

Thank you!

[toiletunes]

I can't wait to try this out! The 7800 needs more puzzle/strategy games 

[doug0909]

Nice, well try this.

 

I think it would be interesting to have a head to head version where the players pick the words for each other. The competition could be turn based, or simply whoever guesses first. Also, perhaps, varying words lengths... 

[+Karl G]

Awesome! Just 2 days ago I asked in the ZPH stream how long it would be before someone made a 7800 version of Wordle. It was nice of you to be so quick about producing one. 

[+Karl G]

The look and feel is great! One suggestion would be to make the color of the box around the selected key be a more contrasting color (it can be hard to see where it is right now).

 

2,500 words is a good number to choose from for gameplay purposes, but it is somewhat limiting in terms of the guesses it will or won't allow. My first game wouldn't accept "phony" as a guess. Would you consider making it bankswitched so that you could have multiple banks filled with possible words? You should be able to have ~3000 per bank, if my math is right.

 

Failing that, it would be nice to have an "honor system" option where it won't check to see if the guessed word is valid.

 

Edit: It would also be cool to have a "hard mode" like the original game where you are forced to use letters that you have found in your guesses.

 

 

[Jaden (JRH)]

I guess I should have expected this to be a thing. I'll check it out later.

 

Also, I can't be the only one who thinks that Wordle is a complete ripoff of Lingo.

[+ZeroPage Homebrew]

21 minutes ago, Jaden (JRH) said:

Also, I can't be the only one who thinks that Wordle is a complete ripoff of Lingo.

Which is a variation of Word Mastermind that came out in 1972. It's turtles all the way down. ?

 

- James

[Jaden (JRH)]

Never even heard of Word Mastermind. Thanks for that little tidbit of information.

[+mksmith]

5 hours ago, Karl G said:

The look and feel is great! One suggestion would be to make the color of the box around the selected key be a more contrasting color (it can be hard to see where it is right now).

 

2,500 words is a good number to choose from for gameplay purposes, but it is somewhat limiting in terms of the guesses it will or won't allow. My first game wouldn't accept "phony" as a guess. Would you consider making it bankswitched so that you could have multiple banks filled with possible words? You should be able to have ~3000 per bank, if my math is right.

 

Failing that, it would be nice to have an "honor system" option where it won't check to see if the guessed word is valid.

 

Edit: It would also be cool to have a "hard mode" like the original game where you are forced to use letters that you have found in your guesses.

Thanks Karl - some nice suggestions there. I'm using a straight 48k Rom so plenty of space for more words. Just need to find bigger lists on the internet!

 

I could add some settings to allow word entry validation and hard mode.

 

Yeah the keyboard cursor is a little naff - would be great to be solid behind the letters too. Will see about improving that!

[+mksmith]

6 hours ago, Karl G said:

Awesome! Just 2 days ago I asked in the ZPH stream how long it would be before someone made a 7800 version of Wordle. It was nice of you to be so quick about producing one. 

I knew someone might jump in and make it so got in first! Been a fun very small project!

[+Muddyfunster]

Cracking job on this Matt!

 

 

[+mksmith]

Ok I've just found the actual Wordle dictionary of words - it's 2,315.  I'll put a poll in to help determine what people might like here as far as a dictionary to read.

Edited February 3, 2022 by mksmith
Removed poll

[+mksmith]

Ok thanks to @RevEng for pointing out there is an actual dictionary (the answers) and an allowed entry dictionary (10,657)!  I guess we should go down that route...

[+mksmith]

I've got the lists sorted so give me a day or so to get the next update out.  I'll upgrade the cart to 128k and spread the allowed dictionary over a few banks.  It will also ensure the speed to be kept up as I can split the words into smaller groups.

[+littaum]

This is awesome!  Any chance to have a post-game summary for each game played?  Total number of games, percentage won, the distribution of when you get your correct guesses, perhaps even a "average time per game".  Would be handy for -- Atari 7800 W O R D L E high score competitions?

 

 

[+mksmith]

4 minutes ago, littaum said:

This is awesome!  Any chance to have a post-game summary for each game played?  Total number of games, percentage won, the distribution of when you get your correct guesses, perhaps even a "average time per game".  Would be handy for -- Atari 7800 W O R D L E high score competitions?

 

 

I'll certainly see what I can do but should be possible! If I incorporate Save key support then they can also be retained ongoing.

[Jaden (JRH)]

I found this pretty amusing bug. Fitting word to describe this too.

[+mksmith]

Thought I'd throw a few funny comments in there when it's wrong ?

 

@Jaden (JRH) sorry mate is there a bug there? I haven't played the game much and may have missed something?

[Jaden (JRH)]

There's two R's that are marked yellow, but there's nowhere else for them to go. If I switched their places, they would still be the same because they're both just R. The game was in an unwinnable state.

[+mksmith]

6 minutes ago, Jaden (JRH) said:

There's two R's that are marked yellow, but there's nowhere else for them to go. If I switched their places, they would still be the same because they're both just R. The game was in an unwinnable state.

I think I know why - I do a scan on available letters and if it's in there but not the actual character I mark it as Brown.  As the the 3rd letter is the correct R then the ones at 2 and 5 as shown as Brown due to that.  I'll do some more research around the rules and how I should show them.

 

[Update] maybe if I have a match and there are no other available potential matches then they should stay grey.

[The Usotsuki]

It reminds me of MECC's "Bagels".

[+mksmith]

Hi all,

 

I finished making the game a 128K cart, split the dictionaries across 5 banks (over 13,000 words!) and thankfully it's still nice and fast validating! I want to fix the colorisation rules before I do another release but that should be within the next 24 hours.