PLAY: logos64 - A Challenging Word Game for C64 - FREE Download

Software
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If you’re in the mood for a challenging and addictive word game, please check out logos64 at: https://visionbasic.weebly.com/logos64.html

logos64 is a C64 port of the hit game Wordle. The latest version of logos64 features:

  • A database of nearly 6,000 words.
  • Instant validation of guesses - no wait time required.
  • Two game types - the daily game or a random game.

logos64 also features cumulative statistics tracked for each player (saved to disk):

  • Total number of games played.
  • Percentage of games won.
  • Current winning streak.
  • Highest winning streak.
  • Guess distribution.

Thanks for taking a look, and have fun playing !

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Interesting! A note on the implementation:

Through the use of a sophisticated technique, the database of close to 6,000 words has been highly compressed to occupy less disk space and less memory. Instead of occupying 5 bytes of RAM, each five-letter word occupies only 1.5 bytes. This database optimization is especially important because logos64 is required to load the entire word database into memory.

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Hope this isn’t too far off topic, but I notice there’s a wordle for the BBC Micro too, which you can play, download, or read more about here. (Wordlists in this case are I think stored on disk - the Beeb only has 32k RAM.)

There’s also a Waffle. (No idea how the dictionary is handled in this case!)

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The word database for that BBC Micro version is impressive. At around 12,000 words, its size is double that of the logos64 database, and very close to the 13,000 five-letter words in the English language.

The BBC Micro runs at 2 MHz, better than the C64’s 1 MHz. But if that BBC Micro version relies on disk access when validating the player’s guess against the word database, that could be slow-going.

Have you tried out that BBC Micro version? How does it play? Do you need to put the emulator on warp mode to make it bearable?

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It’s very responsive - you can play online here. There seems to be no disk access once the challenge is set.

I don’t know if the C64 world has the same possibility, of an in-browser emulator which can load from disk images over the internet (or locally) but it’s been really nice in the land of Beeb to be able to do that.

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Yes, we’re really spoiled to have incredible online BBC Micro emulation.

But online C64 emulation is available, too: see logos64 v2.0.1 : Miles Dyck : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive which I just uploaded.

The process for uploading a C64 disk is a little involved. Assuming you’ve uploaded something there before (a big assumption from me: I’d be happy to help people learn how to do this, as this was my 815th upload to archive.org), you have to:

  1. upload the disk image
  2. add in as much detail as you can about the item, but most importantly, choose the collection Community Software
  3. add in three very important additional metadata fields: emulator = vice-resid, emulator_ext = d64 and emulator_start = the disk image file name (here, logos2023v201.d64). Without these, the disk won’t auto-run in the browser
  4. Select “upload”, and wait …
  5. … and when the page loads, edit the item’s metadata and re-enter the emulator_ext and emulator_start fields, and save the item again. This is a bug in Internet Archive’s upload system, and we have to work around it.

The item should now be playable in your browser, via the magic of MAME and Emscripten. Only the most popular home computers known to US-based Internet Archive operators are emulated.

If you have a lot of items to upload, Internet Archive has a batch command-line tool, ia. It has a learning curve, but doesn’t share the metadata-losing bug of the web uploader.

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