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xyWords's itch.io pageIs your game for DOS or inspired by a game from the DOS-era of PC gaming?
It will only run under MS-DOS or a DOSBox emulator.
It is inspired by the classic CGA 4-colour graphics mode and is targeted at the original IBM-PC and XT.
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Tested it on FreeDOS on a VIA C7 thin client on S3 UniChrome Pro (so EGA/VGA mode was used). I of course didn't read the README first, so here's my first time user experience log:
The Quick Setup brings up a few questions, "Enable Sound" is kind of clear, but is it Adlib, Sound Blaster or just PC Speaker? A user might select yes or no depending on what they have or prefer or despise (e.g. I'd answer "no" for PC Speaker, but "yes" for Adlib). What does "Text Post-Processing" mean in the context? Same for pre-puzzle messages, might be useful to have a short paragraph describing what it is and when one wants to enable/disable it (for now, I went with "yes" for both options). CGA and EGA can probably be detected from the BIOS configuration editor, back in the day I used this code snippet as reference (might of course still allow the user to override): https://gist.github.com/ljmccarthy/3d842add94eebef4ad310a7e9fbe9fb8
The concept is quite nice and the "letter wheel" and help user interface is really well done! In "INTRO-3", I'd have guessed that I can type words such as "SEE", but apparently each letter can only be used once?
One thing I did notice is that the screen mode is changed between e.g. the game screen and the results screen (due to CGA palette changes?). However, in case of EGA/VGA emulating CGA, these screen mode changes could be avoided? It's not a problem for me (with a VGA screen which is quite quick to re-sync to the new mode), but people using OSSC or some other scalers might have more trouble with frequent mode changes.
Hope there will be an updated 256-color VGA version with OPL-2 sound in the future ;)
In any case, I played 5 minutes and 27 seconds, found 31 valid words and 5.688073 words per minute.
Well done, I had a fun time!
Thanks for the detailed note and it's awesome to see it running on your C7 :-)
One thing to note is this was written in QuickBasic 4.5 and I was trying to avoid external libraries and extensions.
Let me reply to a few of your call-outs:
Quick Setup and Descriptions: I'll remove Quick Setup in future versions. I only put it in after I removed "error handling" capability to detect display type. I am using a monochrome flip-bit to get the extra modes on CGA and it fails on EGA/VGA. Reflecting back, I think the utility was a bit clunky and probably un-necessary. I'll go back to using error handling and I've still got enough room under the 384KB target.
I will update the in-game settings to put a description as to what each setting does.
For reference; I'm only using PC-Speaker (I was struggling to get any adlib/sb to work on the 8088 in QB4.5)
Text Post-Processing (when enabled) will consume some CPU resources while it applies some operations to the UI text.
If you have an original 8088/4.7mhz the text post-processing might be a little too slow and annoying.
The circle (letter wheel actually sounds better) has the letters you can use, if there's 2 "E" then you can attempt to make a word with 2 "E" letters. If there's only 1 then your attempted word may only use 1 "E".
Screen Mode - under CGA it will flick between 640x200 and 320x200 to reset the monochrome bit (enabling the extra palettes) but you're right, for EGA/VGA this can be omitted. At worse I might need to clear the screen, but maybe not..
Regarding 256-color and Adlib - I was targeting 4-color CGA based 8088 and trying to squeeze every bit of detail I could out of it. I've thought about writing a windows 3x version in VB (or possibly TPW1.5) targeting VGA/Sound Blaster and keep the puzzle file format the same.
In the meantime I am going to see if I can sneak in 1.1 and put some of the abovementioned changes in :-)
Thanks again!
So I played some more today and in level CHILL-11, I might have found a bug. I don't have a screenshot of before, but in the end, the vertical word "MASS" had two different characters at the end first (I remember, because I tried all combinations ending in the two characters in a brute force way, nothing worked). The horizontal word that lines up with the first "S" in "MASS" ended up being "TSME", which I don't think is a word, and it might have been "TAME" or something before the word "MASS" overwrote the second letter.
ah whoops maybe I put an old CHILL-11 level in there, I had previously modified that level to avoid that problem.. looks like I have a few updates to do :-)