Features:
- a single 40-kilobyte COM file
- contains all 12972 words of the original Wordle game
- same daily puzzle as in original Wordle
- should run on any machine with a slightly IBM-compatible BIOS and DOS 2.x (report a bug if it doesn't!)
- written in 100% 8086 assembly (no C)
- runs in 40x25 color text mode
- on EGA/VGA systems, dark gray ba
- no stats saving
Building requires Python 3 and YASM.
On Unix, just run make, or make WORDSOURCE=nyt to get the "censored" New York Times version of the word list instead of the classic one.
On Windows, run build or build nyt. YASM will be downloaded automatically if needed, but Python 3 must be installed system-wide.
Fire up wordos.com in your favorite emulator, or copy it to some disk and run it on the real thing! As said, it should "just work", but if you encounter any compatibility issues, drop me a note and I'll see if I can fix it.
Enter five letters, confirm your entry by pressing Enter, rinse and repeat. After solving the puzzle or exhausting all six guesses, the game will quit after pressing any key. It can also be quit at any time using the Escape key.
How is this related to vitawrap/WORDOS?
Not related at all, except that vitawrap and me were obviously inspired by the same ideas and chose the same name (and display mode) for our ports. I learned about their WOR-DOS only after my WorDOS was done.
On the GitHub page, click on the latest release in the right sidebar and download wordos.com from there.
Because I can! Seeing all the Wordle ports sprouting left and right, I thought I'd give it a try too.
Because assembly is a lot of fun, and Wordle is a simple enough game to be implemented in assembly in three evening sessions. Sure, with C, it could have been a single day, but where's the fun in that?
Besides, I always like minimalistic approaches and I hate all forms of bloat. If I used a C runtime, I guess I'd get an extra 10k of code size simply because of that.
By using fancy encoding: there are 26^5 = 11.9 million possible four-letter English words, which fits nicely into three bytes per word. No further compression is used; the word list really is a raw 39k blob in the 40k executable.
There are two potential reasons: First, you may simple have the wrong date on the DOS side, as not all DOSes are Y2K compliant. Second, keep in mind that the default build of WorDOS uses the classic word list from the old powerlanguage.co.uk website, not the new list from the New York Times website.
Well, obviously you can change the DOS date between sessions. However, there might be another way hidden in the source code ... a secret key maybe?
- Mail: keyj@emphy.de
- Twitter: KeyJ_trbl