Wordle for the BBC Micro & Electron

[ChrisB]

So - I've worked out what happened with QWEST. Seems a copy/paste of the code and a label not updated meant the code wandered off into another routine. Surprised it didn't end up in a heap on the floor.... It almost certainly happens for other words just they might not be such interesting ones.

However it seems that QWEST is in the dictionary - just not the target dictionary it should have been looking at - which has made me go back and look at the dictionary that I'm using. It seems there are quite a lot of words that I don't think should be there so I'm putting together another one which should have more usual words in it. I don't have space to use the Wordle one as it stands - or rather I don't have space to used the Wordle one without re-writing the Basic in assembler so I need to use an alternative.

Keyboard display is also corrected so I hope to have a (final?) version out later today/tomorrow.

[ChrisB]

I've added V4 above - hopefully the last version...

Changes as follows:

• Included an updated dictionary which should have more conventional words and less proper nouns
• Fixed an issue that could cause a word not in the target list to be selected
• Fixed incorrect colouring of the keyboard
• Included an alternate colour scheme that should be easier to read for people with colour blindness.

Lurkio if you could do the honours and update bbcmicro.

[roland]

The game is also available in the WiDFS *DMENU but it doesn’t run because WiDFS overwrites code at &A00 after the code of this game is loaded.

I’m working on a patch for WiDFS…

[leenew]

Hi,
Is anyone having difficulties getting Wordle to work on a real BBC Micro model B?
I cannot get it to recognise any words.

I have managed to get it to work on my Master, but alas, not the beeb...

Lee.

[lurkio]

Is anyone having difficulties getting Wordle to work on a real BBC Micro model B?
I cannot get it to recognise any words.
I have managed to get it to work on my Master, but alas, not the beeb...

I'm away from my Beebs at the mo, but I've been talking Lee through transferring the Wordle .SSD to his Master and also through running the game on various filesystems on his Model B, so I can say that the context is as follows: he got Wordle v4 to run on his Master from a MicroSD card via MMFS, but he failed to get it working on his Model B.

On his Model B, he tried running Wordle v4 from DFS 1.2, SWRAM-MMFS (using the same .SSD as on his Master), and RamFS (DataCentre) -- but it wouldn't work properly on any of them!: it just failed to recognise any words at all.

[marcusjambler]

I've got V3 running on Issue 7 with 0.9 Acorn DFS 8271 controller happy to swap for 1.2DFS to test that

Edit : I did say V4 but I hadnt put it on the gotek

[marcusjambler]

Cant find DFS 1.2 anywhere... The file on MDFS is 1k long

[lurkio]

Cant find DFS 1.2 anywhere... The file on MDFS is 1k long

It's this file in this folder.

[marcusjambler]

Yup I can confirm that V4 does not work with 0.9 or 1.2DFS

[ChrisB]

Hmm. I am confused - the new version doesn't do anything significantly different with memory to V3 (there are slight differences but I can't see what might be the problem).

I've fired it up on my Bplus with an MMC and it works fine there.

Question - does it work if you CHAIN"Intro" rather than boot off of the disk?

[marcusjambler]

Question - does it work if you CHAIN"Intro" rather than boot off of the disk?

No this doesnt work in 0.9 or 1.2 DFS. Changing the seed doesn't help either

[ChrisB]

I don't understand this at all - There's nothing particularly nasty in the code.

Anyhow - I've "undone" the memory allocation changes that I put in for V4 here:

wordle.ssd

(31.25 KiB) Downloaded 43 times

Could you give this one a try?

[marcusjambler]

Could you give this one a try?

Sorry Chris still not accepting words using 0.9 or 1.2 DFS.
I dont have the other Filing Systems to try.

Edit : It is working in BeebEm

[marcusjambler]

Strangely CH."INTROA" doesnt finish loading the game screen... It stops with the screen full of random chars.
Whereas CH."INTRO" does fully load but wont accept any words

[flaxcottage]

Tried this one and the results are;

1. Works on a Master with a Datacentre in DFS, RAM, ADFS HDD, booting from all.

2. Does not work on a BBC with 8271 DFS and DNFS. The words appear not to be in the file.

3. Works perfectly in BeebEm 4.17 for all BBC variants

Weird this one.

[lurkio]

Wordle v4 works fine in Model B mode in all of the following emulators: b2 on macOS, BeebJIT on macOS (under WINE), Win BeebEm4.17 on macOS (under WINE), JSBeeb.

A very subtle bug/issue, this..!

[KenLowe]

Confirming that I'm also seeing the same issue on a beeb with DFS2.26 (1770 controller). Switch in the co-pro and it works fine.

[lurkio]

Confirming that I'm also seeing the same issue on a beeb with DFS2.26 (1770 controller). Switch in the co-pro and it works fine.

Do you mean you’re running Wordle v4 on the co-pro?

Is this a processor (instruction set) issue then?

[KenLowe]

Confirming that I'm also seeing the same issue on a beeb with DFS2.26 (1770 controller). Switch in the co-pro and it works fine.

Do you mean you’re running Wordle v4 on the co-pro?

Is this a processor (instruction set) issue then?

Correct. Wordle v4 works fine with my 6502 co-pro active, but not on the plain beeb with the co-pro disabled. I suspect a memory corruption issue more than an instruction set issue. One that is present on the beeb, but not when the co-pro is active.

Edit: Ok, so without fully understanding why, changing these two lines in INTRO (and IntroA) from:

Code: Select all

51PAGE=&6F00:CHAIN"Wordle"
52END

to:

Code: Select all

51*LOAD Wordle 6F00
52PAGE=&6F00:RUN

seems to fix it.

Edit2: Hmmm. It's not as straight forward as that! Not sure how I got it working a minute ago, but power off and on, and it's broken again!

[lurkio]

Code: Select all

51*LOAD Wordle 6F00
52PAGE=&6F00:RUN

I don't think that's "safe" because it won't alter the values of TOP and LOMEM because there's no OLD before the RUN..?

Maybe try something like this instead of just RUN:

Code: Select all

*FX138,0,79
*FX138,0,46
*FX138,0,13
*FX138,0,249
*FX138,0,13

[ChrisB]

OK - I believe the issue has been located. Some late "optimisation" in the code introduced a bug where I was comparing more memory that I needed and this was uninitialised zero page - which I presume on the B+, master and emulators appears to be zeros but on a normal B doesn't seem to be.

If you type

Code: Select all

?&7D=?&85

before you run the game it should fix it for the moment.

I'll get a proper fix out in the next day or so.

[KenLowe]

OK - I believe the issue has been located. Some late "optimisation" in the code introduced a bug where I was comparing more memory that I needed and this was uninitialised zero page - which I presume on the B+, master and emulators appears to be zeros but on a normal B doesn't seem to be.

If you type

Code: Select all

?&7D=?&85

before you run the game it should fix it for the moment.

I'll get a proper fix out in the next day or so.

That didn't work first time round, and I needed to enter the following to get it working:

Code: Select all

?&85=&85

However,

Code: Select all

?&7D=?&85

did work after a power cycle.

Looking at the code a bit further, would I be correct in thinking that the following code in CODE needs to be changed? I've given it a quick test, and it seems to work:

Code: Select all

.0967
  LDA #&00
  STA &7F
  LDA &80
  STA &78
  JSR &09A0
  JSR &0993 ; always returns with X=4
  INX       ; X=5
.0976
  LDA &77,X ; changed from LDA &78,X
  CMP &7F,X ; changed from LDA &80,X
  BNE &0984
  DEX
  BNE &0976
  LDA #&FF
  STA &7F
  RTS
.0984

[ChrisB]

Basically yes.

The INX was left in from a previous version and is in fact the issue. The offset doesn't need to be changed because at this point we know the first letter (It's how the words are indexed) so this will always be right. So comparing letters 2-5 (as opposed to letters 2-6!) is sufficient.

It seems that the values of memory in zero page are not initialised on the BBC B so the values at &78+5 (&7d) and &80+5 (&85) are different so the comparison always fails and the word is "not found".

Anyhow - with that in mind here is another version that should fix the problem and behave correctly on real hardware. Please let me know if this works for people.

wordle.ssd

(31 KiB) Downloaded 41 times

[KenLowe]

Ah, that makes sense. I had assumed you needed to check all 5 letters, which is why I adjusted the offset and left the INX in place. I guess just checking the 4 letters will give you a bit of a speed boost compared to the fix I made which checks all 5 letters.

Thanks for the update. I'll give it a test later.

[flaxcottage]

Tried this new one and the results now are;

1. Works on a Master with a Datacentre in DFS, RAM, ADFS HDD, booting from all.

2. Works on a BBC with 8271 DFS and DNFS and ADFS with PAGE at &2100. Quite a severe test that last.

3. Works perfectly in BeebEm 4.17 for all BBC variants

4. Works perfectly over my Econet on both BBCs and Masters

5. Works perfectly on an A5000 running !65Host

Brillo, thanks.

[ChrisB]

Wow - thanks for that - it's quite a list!

I'm surprised it copes with ADFS - I believe I've comprehensively trampled over it's workspace. Mind you I was pleasantly surprised to see the second processor earlier. I am however reasonably sure that it won't work if you load off of tape... (It could easily be made to work but I'm not sure there's much market - although it might amuse the external sites that seem to have picked up on it.).

[roland]

After I patched my WiDFS so that it does not use the workspace at &A00 Wordle V5 runs on my Beeb with WiDFS

Is it difficult to change the dictionary to other languages?

[ChrisB]

Is it difficult to change the dictionary to other languages?

No not really - provided there aren't accents or similar required. Just need a list of "target" words - I would imagine anything more than a few hundred words would make too many to see repeats. Wordle has 2000 odd. And a dictionary of "possible" words. Space the Beeb gives you 11000-12000 words in total - but if you aimed for 8000 or so that would be more than enough.

[roland]

I’ll try to make a list of dutch words.

[ChrisB]

On the basis of the testing by flax cottage above I have updated the original post with V5. The only change is the bug fix. Seeds will be compatible.