Segle

Wordle clone for Sega Master System (SMS).

The game

Aim

Guess the word in six guesses or fewer.

There are 2309 possible answers.

Each guess generates a colour-coded response:

• Grey = guessed letter is not in the answer
• Green = guessed letter is in the answer, in the place guessed
• Yellow = there is still at least one instance of the guessed letter to be found in the answer, but it's in a different position from the one guessed

The game ends when either the answer has been correctly guessed (all green tiles), or when all six guesses have been used up.

Controls

• Up cycles through the letters of the alphabet, from A to Z

• Down cycles through the letters of the alphabet, from Z to A

• Left deletes a letter from the current guess. Action button 1 also does the same thing.

• Right accepts the currently selected letter and moves onto the next letter in the guess

• Action button 1 deletes a letter from the current guess. Left also does the same thing.

• Action button 2 submits the guess and moves onto the next guess unless the game is over

The reset button starts a new game after the current game has ended. The pause button does nothing.

Limitations

The real Wordle game checks all guesses are actually dictionary words. This makes the game harder.

I haven't yet implemented this in Segle, but it is planned.

Building

This was written to target the z88dk-z80asm assembler, which is easy enough to use but quite limited in terms of directives, etc.

I might transfer over to a different assembler at some point.

Build steps

1. Install z88dk from https://z88dk.org/site/download
2. Ensure make is available
3. Change directory to this repo
4. Run make

The build binary is build/segle.sms and should be capable of being loaded into any SMS emulator or being burned to a ROM and run on some real hardware...

Tile art

I wrote a basic utility in Python for generating SMS tile art from a bitmap file which is how I generated the tile art in this project.

This can be found in https://github.com/retcon85/retcon-util as img2tiles.py

If you have this utility in a folder called ../retcon-utils relative to the segle project, you can run make tiles to generate new tile data from an updated letters4x4.bmp

Recommended development resources

• SMSPower! - incredible site which can answer most any question you might have about developing for the SMS
• Emulicious - good accurate emulator with built in debugger and tile viewer
• Z88DK - toolchain including C compiler and linker targeting SMS amongst other platforms
• Aseprite - nice little sprite / pixel art tool
• Adobe Photoshop - for all the heavy lifting before getting things into Aseprite

Video

Recorded and uploaded by the wonderful folks at SMSPower! as a submission to their 2022 Coding Challenge:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5dyiZn3YA8&t=7s

Cartridge case cover

This is designed to fit a standard Master System cartridge case and can be printed out with dimensions 270mm x 172mm to fit.