2600 Words (Wordle clone)

[+Karl G]

10 hours ago, Novastar said:

Love the changes.  My almost 7 year old wanted to play and he loved it too, had to help a bit with Glade.  Did find what looks to be a bug.  Not sure if it was a dictionary error or a typing error.  He said he was trying to write Claps.  It took CGaps as a word.

Thanks! There are a lot of weird, unrecognizable words in the word validation dictionary, but yeah, that's not one of them. The good news is that I can reproduce it here, so I should be able to find the cause.

 

10 hours ago, Novastar said:

He also wanted me to say that he would love to make up words for guessing.  He was really excited and we talked about what a it means to be a programmer.  Anyways, just wanted to say that the whole family loves the game and I thought it would be interesting to see how excited a really young person is about this game

That's great to hear! I'll add the ability to turn word validation off to my list of possible future features. I appreciate the feedback. ?

 

Edit: Did you mean he wants to input a word for others in your household to guess? That's a feature that's on my maybe list, too. I could see how it could be fun.

[+Karl G]

@ZeroPage Homebrew I wanted to thank you for showing my game on last night's show.

 

Before I delve too deeply into the causes of the issues you experienced during the show, I was wondering if they could be related to the issues you have had with 64K ROMs in the past? Or have you found a console/multicart combo that consistently plays them without the glitches you had with these roms before?

 

Edit: Can anyone else reproduce the glitches seen on the stream last night? I cannot under Stella or on my 7800.

[+ZeroPage Homebrew]

9 hours ago, Karl G said:

@ZeroPage Homebrew I wanted to thank you for showing my game on last night's show.

You're very welcome, what an excellent implementation of Wordle on the 2600. As per usual you've hit it out of the park with this port!

 

Quote

Before I delve too deeply into the causes of the issues you experienced during the show, I was wondering if they could be related to the issues you have had with 64K ROMs in the past? Or have you found a console/multicart combo that consistently plays them without the glitches you had with these roms before?

You're absolutely right. I just ran 2600 Words on my UnoCart and it works perfectly without any glitches!

 

Looks like the issues started happening about 5 mins into playing and the 2600 had been on for quite a while before that. What a incredibly crazy side effect of the glitch to flash the answer on the screen! I'll add it to the list of 64K EF games that have issues on my particular combination of RGB Mod + Harmony Encore.

 

Given that information, it's probably not worth pursuing a software workaround as @batari has all the hardware/information and is looking into it, it only occurs with in extremely fairly rare conditions and I can use the UnoCart in the meantime for all EF+ games.

 

- James

 

Spoiler

Just for fun I warmed up my 2600 for about 30 mins and then popped in 2600 Words to see what it did. Keep in mind I did NOT touch the reset switch at all the whole time, it was resetting on its own. It was actually pretty well behaved during the broadcast last night considering the shenanigans it's getting up to in the video below....

 

(WATCH AT 1080P60 FOR BEST QUALITY)

 

 

[+sramirez2008]

13 hours ago, Karl G said:

Edit: Can anyone else reproduce the glitches seen on the stream last night? I cannot under Stella or on my 7800.

I’m not seeing the word flash on the bottom of the screen, but I am seeing the colors change to grey scale throughout the game play.  I’ve been playing the latest ROM with my wife for the past 45 mins and the colors due change every now and then. Sometimes it happens only the top half of the screen, sometimes it happens on both halves of the screen.  
Btw, I’m using my modded 7800 with my Harmony Encore cart.

[+sramirez2008]

Also noticed that toggling the left difficulty switch between sound/no sound doesn’t turn the sound off.  It holds onto the note being played at the point of toggle.  I hope that makes sense. ?

[+Karl G]

10 hours ago, sramirez2008 said:

I’m not seeing the word flash on the bottom of the screen, but I am seeing the colors change to grey scale throughout the game play.  I’ve been playing the latest ROM with my wife for the past 45 mins and the colors due change every now and then. Sometimes it happens only the top half of the screen, sometimes it happens on both halves of the screen.  
Btw, I’m using my modded 7800 with my Harmony Encore cart.

Thanks! Do you happen to have an UnoCart or a PlusCart to try on the same console? If the issues don't appear on these, then that's more evidence that it's the same issue with 64K ROM issue on Harmony Encore. If you do see issues, then it's almost certainly my code that's to blame.

 

I appreciate you taking the time to test!

[+Karl G]

 

10 hours ago, Bruce-Robert Pocock said:

I “skimmed” the ZPH show from yesterday, as Twitch issues kept me from watching live and I haven't sat down to the full thing yet. I happen to have broken my Uno Cart (the little dust cover spikey bit!) so I can only test with Encore and Plus at the moment.

 

Thank you! The comparison between the two carts is very useful here. As for the color desaturation issue, I'm not actually using flicker at all, but just alternating lines, so what you are seeing isn't due to interpolation. As @sramirez2008 pointed out, it's similar to how the game Pitkat draws the screen. I can't reproduce the not accepting "ELBOW" as a guess, so maybe this was also related to the apparent RAM corruption issue with 64K ROMs on that cart.

[+Bruce-Robert Pocock]

2 minutes ago, Karl G said:

 

 

Thank you! The comparison between the two carts is very useful here. As for the color desaturation issue, I'm not actually using flicker at all, but just alternating lines, so what you are seeing isn't due to interpolation. As @sramirez2008 pointed out, it's similar to how the game Pitkat draws the screen. I can't reproduce the not accepting "ELBOW" as a guess, so maybe this was also related to the apparent RAM corruption issue with 64K ROMs on that cart.

In hindsight, I may have had the Difficulty Switch on A and tried it as a "wild guess" which I think is not allowed in that mode? TBH I didn't diagnose it deeply and just guessed something else to move it along.

 

I'm using “interpolation” very broadly there … the TV upscaler has some kind of AI routines that try to smoothe the video and may have decided that the RF lines alternating were meant to be mixed, or something. EG: In Grizzards when two of the same monster sprite get within ±10px of one another a third "phantom" sprite appears between them (although that's flicker there). IE: LG is sometimes too “smart” for its own good. It only occurred with RF out, and I think it only happens when I use the TV's own tuner. For my own video capture I use a nice “dumb” tuner and the RetroTink to avoid those artifacts but I didn't have the tuner handy last night.

 

(The ticking noise is a complete surprise to me and I have not seen that before. It was around 1-2 ticks per second.)

[+sramirez2008]

54 minutes ago, Karl G said:

Do you happen to have an UnoCart or a PlusCart to try on the same console?

I have both.  I'll try to test later today each later today.

[+Karl G]

22 minutes ago, Bruce-Robert Pocock said:

In hindsight, I may have had the Difficulty Switch on A and tried it as a "wild guess" which I think is not allowed in that mode? TBH I didn't diagnose it deeply and just guessed something else to move it along.

Oh yes ... hard mode. In hard mode, you have to use the letters you have already found in previous guesses. In the case of green letters, you have to use them in the same position, too. If your guess is rejected because of hard mode, the word will flash bright orange, instead of red if the word is not in the dictionary.

[+sramirez2008]

Tested latest ROM with 2600 UNO and PlusCart.  Both worked fine. I did not experience any issues. ?

[+Karl G]

10 minutes ago, sramirez2008 said:

Tested latest ROM with 2600 UNO and PlusCart.  Both worked fine. I did not experience any issues. ?

Thank you! And that is good news, too! Maybe I should look into a different bankswitch scheme for Harmony Encore users to work around this issue.

[+sramirez2008]

Just now, Karl G said:

Thank you! And that is good news, too! Maybe I should look into a different bankswitch scheme for Harmony Encore users to work around this issue.

I really like the look and sfx of your version.  Pretty cool to have it added to the PlusCart as well.

[+batari]

On 3/9/2022 at 2:40 PM, ZeroPage Homebrew said:

You're very welcome, what an excellent implementation of Wordle on the 2600. As per usual you've hit it out of the park with this port!

 

You're absolutely right. I just ran 2600 Words on my UnoCart and it works perfectly without any glitches!

 

Looks like the issues started happening about 5 mins into playing and the 2600 had been on for quite a while before that. What a incredibly crazy side effect of the glitch to flash the answer on the screen! I'll add it to the list of 64K EF games that have issues on my particular combination of RGB Mod + Harmony Encore.

 

Given that information, it's probably not worth pursuing a software workaround as @batari has   the hardware/information and is looking into it, it only occurs with in extremely fairly rare conditions and I can use the UnoCart in the meantime for all EF+ games.

 

- James

 

  Reveal hidden contents

Just for fun I warmed up my 2600 for about 30 mins and then popped in 2600 Words to see what it did. Keep in mind I did NOT touch the reset switch at all the whole time, it was resetting on its own. It was actually pretty well behaved during the broadcast last night considering the shenanigans it's getting up to in the video below....

 

(WATCH AT 1080P60 FOR BEST QUALITY)

 

 

When you were having issues with a Harmony Encore and a console, I got the console in the mail and confirmed some glitches in 64k+ games.

 

After some troubleshooting, I found the problem to be a damaged cart connector. Half of the connector for A7 was broken off and sitting in the bottom of the cart slot, preventing full insertion of the cartridge and A7 itself made a poor connection on the card edge. I thought I had posted that somewhere but I don't see any followup post in the thread above. I was able to pull the damaged connector out and get the cart to insert fully, and the problems went away completely.

 

In testing, 32k or smaller games had no problems with the bad cart connector. It is possible that 64k+ games may be a lot more sensitive to poor connections. 

 

Is anyone else experiencing issues? I saw something about the screen going to black and white but the Harmony cart couldn't directly cause such an issue as it has no control over the chroma signal out of the TIA.

 

That all said, I can at least suggest something worth trying. Some early Concerto users found that Concerto's menu had issues with certain SD cards, and I was able to fix Concerto once the problem was identified. Since Concerto and Harmony Encore share design elements, it is possible that problems here are also related to the SD card. What I would try, to be sure, is remove the card after the game loads, and see if the problem persists.

[Ramses]

I'm actually getting an "Unrecognized file type!" error when I try to run the 2600-words-9-NTSC.bin build on my Harmony Cart. It's the first time I've ever gotten that error with a game rom. I copied the file from the SD card back to the computer and ran it in Stella successfully so I don't know what's up.

Edited March 11, 2022 by Ramses

[+splendidnut]

Original Harmony Cart doesn't support >32k sized ROMs.  This game is 64k so would require a Harmony Encore or UnoCart or PlusCart.

[Ramses]

Thanks! I wasn't aware.

[+batari]

So as I have been playing the game on Harmony Encore, I noticed something. On two successive powerups, I got the words "FILED" and "OMEGA" in the first two games. Sounds like the random number generator is not being as random as it could be?

[+Karl G]

43 minutes ago, batari said:

So as I have been playing the game on Harmony Encore, I noticed something. On two successive powerups, I got the words "FILED" and "OMEGA" in the first two games. Sounds like the random number generator is not being as random as it could be?

I think the randomization code was actually originally your code? On startup:

 

	CLEAN_START
    lda INTIM       ; unknown value
    sta Rand8       ; use as seed
    eor #$FF        ; both seed values cannot be 0, so flip the bits 
    sta Rand16      ;   just in case INTIM was 0

 

And the random number generator:

SubGetRand3
    lda Rand8
    lsr
    rol Rand16
    bcc ____noeor3
    eor #$B4 
____noeor3
    sta Rand8
    eor Rand16
    rts
; End SubGetRand3

 

I haven't noticed any issues in Random Play mode in recent builds, but I'll see if I can detect any patterns.

[RevEng]

The start up time and resulting RIOT contents may not be that different from boot to boot, Using it as a seed is better than the same sequence every time, but it's always best to reseed based on some user interaction. E.g. you can crank the lfsr until the user starts the game. (assuming a title screen or similar is present)

[Thomas Jentzsch]

4 hours ago, Karl G said:

I think the randomization code was actually originally your code? On startup:

	CLEAN_START
    lda INTIM       ; unknown value
    sta Rand8       ; use as seed
    eor #$FF        ; both seed values cannot be 0, so flip the bits 
    sta Rand16      ;   just in case INTIM was 0

 

That code works very well on a real cart, but not when you are using a flash cart. Because there the timer might not be as random as required.

 

I would agree with @RevEng suggested too, simply call SubGetRand3 during the title screen.

Edited March 12, 2022 by Thomas Jentzsch

[+batari]

4 hours ago, Karl G said:

I think the randomization code was actually originally your code? On startup:

 

	CLEAN_START
    lda INTIM       ; unknown value
    sta Rand8       ; use as seed
    eor #$FF        ; both seed values cannot be 0, so flip the bits 
    sta Rand16      ;   just in case INTIM was 0

 

And the random number generator:

SubGetRand3
    lda Rand8
    lsr
    rol Rand16
    bcc ____noeor3
    eor #$B4 
____noeor3
    sta Rand8
    eor Rand16
    rts
; End SubGetRand3

 

I haven't noticed any issues in Random Play mode in recent builds, but I'll see if I can detect any patterns.

Yep, it's my code, I didn't realize that. That code for seeding the random number generator on INTIM was written before Harmony existed. It never occurred to me that it would be predictable on a flashcart.

[+Karl G]

10 hours ago, RevEng said:

The start up time and resulting RIOT contents may not be that different from boot to boot, Using it as a seed is better than the same sequence every time, but it's always best to reseed based on some user interaction. E.g. you can crank the lfsr until the user starts the game. (assuming a title screen or similar is present)

Easiest fix ever. Thanks!

[+Nathan Strum]

Sometimes... you just can't win.

 

[Novastar]

On 3/9/2022 at 5:11 AM, Karl G said:

Edit: Did you mean he wants to input a word for others in your household to guess? That's a feature that's on my maybe list, too. I could see how it could be fun.

Sorry for getting back so late.  Yeah that is what he was saying.  Actually, we've been doing that on paper with his spelling words from school and he has been enjoying that.  Even more fun, I came home from work and found that my wife had tried to boot up the Atari and play, but she couldn't find it on the Plus cart.  Haha, it's making my wife play video games.  I love it.