It's odd, isn't it. It took me an hour to make a Boggle grid for the QL, and all I'd need to do was add a title and a method of keeping score and I'd have a QL equivalent of both of Jamie's games and a Spectrum type-in from
way after type-ins were still a major concern.
The process of throwing the dice was so easy that I thought I could do it on a ZX80, and I'd already started making a routine to shuffle the alphabet. A tweak here, a cut-down to 16 characters there, and...
why won't it work? I went searching through a ROM disassmebly to find out his its RND function worked, and about three hours just trying to get it to loop more than once. And because of the way it has to be input, ZX80 machine code is a bit like trying to do a Rubik's Cube blindfolded. An assembler! An assembler! My kingdom for an assembler!
Some people out there still think SuperBASIC is beyond them. I've picked up enough of it in the last year to see me through for a long time.
FrancoisLanciault wrote:Been there done that a the QL a long time ago (around 2004 if I recall). The program would ask you for a grid of letters and, looking into a plain text word dictionary, would find all possible words in the grid and output the result sorted by length. I did that at the time in order to cheat in online Boogle games ! I can pull out the source if you want.
Really, all you have to do now is generate a scrambled grid, and you're there.
Take a look at the C code in the Zoggle link - Jamie assures me that he took the letter distribution from a real, physical set of Boggle dice, and although it's given as a string of 96 consecutive letters, each group of six is one of the dice.
Andrew wrote:I found a list - it's just 1.6Mb. I guess it's a bit large for the QL. Maybe Q68 could cope with the list.
Well, QemuLator can handle 4 MB of memory, and QPC2 goes up to 255 MB...
...I dread to think what the loading time from a microdrive would be like (if there could ever be one that size) - and don't get me started on a tape!