Word Guess - Wordle Port WIP

[CardboardBox]

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:

Spoiler

word_guess_v0.1.bin

word_guess.bin

word_guess_v0.2.bin
word_guess_v0.2_PAL60.bin

word_guess_v0.3.bin

word_guess_v0.3_PAL60.bin

word_guess_v1.0.bin

word_guess_v1.0_PAL60.bin

word_guess_v1.1.bin

word_guess_v1.1_PAL60.bin

word_guess_v1.2.bin

word_guess_v1.2_PAL60.bin

 

Edited March 14, 2022 by CardboardBox
v1.3

[Thomas Jentzsch]

I really like the presentation and UI of this one a lot. Not sure if the game needs a score, though.

 

How many words are included and how did you encode them?

 

Minor UI suggestions: 

• There should be an option where each line begins empty (e.g. via difficulty switch), that forces the player to add/edit all five letters
• It should be possible to abort the current game and start a new one (e.g. RESET)
• And option to reset the current letter to empty (or A) (e.g. SELECT)

 

BTW: How complicated would it be to create a version in other languages (German, Spanish, French...)?

Edited February 12, 2022 by Thomas Jentzsch

[+Karl G]

Very impressive display! I see that you got the colors via the playfield, but I have no idea how you achieved what appears to be repeating double-width player objects. Yours also appears to be farther along. I'm also curious how you fit the dictionary into 32K, and if you used one or two dictionaries like the actual Wordle game does. I will say that I prefer having the virtual keyboard for input, and being able to see what letters were found on there at a glance. I guess I'll finish up some of the features I'm working on, and see which version the community prefers.

[DeafAtariFromKansas]

Another good game, but it is very slow than @Karl G's version with keyboard on screen which version makes it easier to enter letter instead of charge letter on each block on this version here. Never see any score on wordie

[CardboardBox]

8 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

I really like the presentation and UI of this one a lot. Not sure if the game needs a score, though.

 

How many words are included and how did you encode them?

 

Minor UI suggestions: 

• There should be an option where each line begins empty (e.g. via difficulty switch), that forces the player to add/edit all five letters
• It should be possible to abort the current game and start a new one (e.g. RESET)
• And option to reset the current letter to empty (or A) (e.g. SELECT)

 

BTW: How complicated would it be to create a version in other languages (German, Spanish, French...)?

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.

 

3 hours ago, Karl G said:

Very impressive display! I see that you got the colors via the playfield, but I have no idea how you achieved what appears to be repeating double-width player objects.

Thanks! The letters are just single-width, that's how. They're 8 clocks wide and 21 scanlines tall.

3 hours ago, Karl G said:

I'm also curious how you fit the dictionary into 32K, and if you used one or two dictionaries like the actual Wordle game does.

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.

 

3 hours ago, Karl G said:

I will say that I prefer having the virtual keyboard for input, and being able to see what letters were found on there at a glance.

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 ?‍♂️

 

Edited February 12, 2022 by CardboardBox
Add comment on other languages.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

28 minutes ago, CardboardBox said:

Edit: Other languages could be simple if they don't have accents. Including accents would take a lot of work.

I don't know about other languages, but at least in German you could replace special letters with two letter combinations (Ä=AE, Ö = OE, Ü = UE, ß = SS).

Quote

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 ?‍♂️

After playing a few rounds, I think the game works well without a keyboard. Entering the letters seems to be about as fast as with a keyboard. And you can see which letters are allowed from the game board as well as on a dedicated keyboard, plus you see their position too. And you can change the letters in any order. Maybe you just have to get used to it?

 

BTW: Sometimes I accidentally press fire twice. Maybe block duplicate words. And since I start always with the same word, maybe preset that one for the next game instead of AAAAA.

Edited February 12, 2022 by Thomas Jentzsch

[CardboardBox]

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

[Thomas Jentzsch]

Perfect!  

[Bomberman94]

Wow this is a really great version of the game! Maybe you could make a PAL version because playing this on a PAL Atari only has one color ? - what makes it a „bit difficult“. 
 

I‘m not a native speaker but I never guessed „RAJAH“ ?

[CardboardBox]

14 hours ago, Bomberman94 said:

Wow this is a really great version of the game! Maybe you could make a PAL version because playing this on a PAL Atari only has one color ? - what makes it a „bit difficult“. 
 

I‘m not a native speaker but I never guessed „RAJAH“ ?

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.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

1 hour ago, CardboardBox said:

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.

Probably just another spelling of Raja.

[Bomberman94]

On 2/14/2022 at 8:11 AM, CardboardBox said:

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.

After playing some time with the PAL60 version I can say everything’s working fine ??

 

Nice effect with the colors on the title screen and music ?

[ComputerSpaceFan]

This thing is awesome! 

I loaded it on the Flashback Portable and admittedly the colors are off by one column. The Green and Yellow success indicators are too far to the right.

I don't suppose this could be fixed to also play on the Flashback Portable, could it?

[Thomas Jentzsch]

1 minute ago, ComputerSpaceFan said:

I loaded it on the Flashback Portable and admittedly the colors are off by one column. The Green and Yellow success indicators are too far to the right.

I don't suppose this could be fixed to also play on the Flashback Portable, could it?

Looks like the FB is incompatible.  

 

@CardboardBox In Stella's Options/Developer/TIA you can enable some common TIA incompatibilities. Maybe that helps fixing the problem.

[+FujiSkunk]

Nice work!

[CardboardBox]

8 hours ago, ComputerSpaceFan said:

This thing is awesome! 

I loaded it on the Flashback Portable and admittedly the colors are off by one column. The Green and Yellow success indicators are too far to the right.

I don't suppose this could be fixed to also play on the Flashback Portable, could it?

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.

 

8 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Looks like the FB is incompatible.  

 

@CardboardBox In Stella's Options/Developer/TIA you can enable some common TIA incompatibilities. Maybe that helps fixing the problem.

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.

[ComputerSpaceFan]

1 hour ago, CardboardBox said:

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?

 

One playfield column. Imagine in this screenshot that R and I are correct. It looks like this.

 

[CardboardBox]

18 minutes ago, ComputerSpaceFan said:

One playfield column. Imagine in this screenshot that R and I are correct. It looks like this.

 

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.

[Thomas Jentzsch]

3 hours ago, ComputerSpaceFan said:

One playfield column. Imagine in this screenshot that R and I are correct. It looks like this.

 

Wow, that's an extreme incompatibility. That should show in quite a lot of other games, no?

[JetSetIlly]

2 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Wow, that's an extreme incompatibility. That should show in quite a lot of other games, no?

 

Isn't this just the same issue that affects Quickstep? In which case, it's not often noticeable from my understanding. From my notes, this issue can also be caused by certain RGB mods.

 

 

[Thomas Jentzsch]

30 minutes ago, JetSetIlly said:

Isn't this just the same issue that affects Quickstep?

Quickstep does look like this:

 

So it is just one pixel (the timing is 1/3 CPU cycle off). But here the difference seems huge (~16/3 CPU cycles). 

 

Actually I find it hard to believe that such an incompatibility exists. @ComputerSpaceFan Can you post a picture, please?

Edited February 17, 2022 by Thomas Jentzsch

[JetSetIlly]

9 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

So it is just one pixel (the timing is 1/3 CPU cycle off). But here the difference seem huge (~16/3 CPU cycles). 

 

Actually I find it hard to believe that such an incompatibility exists. @ComputerSpaceFan Can you post a picture, please?

 

Agreed. That would be a fundamental error in the hardware. It would stick out like a sore thumb.

[ComputerSpaceFan]

4 hours ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Actually I find it hard to believe that such an incompatibility exists. @ComputerSpaceFan Can you post a picture, please?

Here you go. The R and the A are valid in this one.

 

 

[JetSetIlly]

Just now, ComputerSpaceFan said:

Here you go. The R and the A are valid in this one.

 

 

Wow

[Thomas Jentzsch]

7 minutes ago, JetSetIlly said:

Wow

Double wow!

 

The timing of that Flashback is extremely off. I wonder if it is broken somehow.

Edited February 17, 2022 by Thomas Jentzsch