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LSAIT Hangman

Introduction

Back in secondary school, I had at least two ideas for applications that I wanted to write for my school’s modern languages department. One of them was to be called “Pour Aller” (roughly “How do I get to”), in which you would guide a character around the screen by giving it directions in French. Pour Aller was was never written. The second idea stemmed from my long-standing affection for the game of hangman: I decided to make a foreign-language-orientated version of the game to help people learn lists of foreign vocabulary. The program was perhaps over-ambitious for a BASIC program given the constraints of the machines I was using; this made it rather interesting to develop.

The school’s language activity room had four Acorn Master 128 microcomputers, all with BBC BASIC IV and 128 kB of memory; this was in about 1996, though, and these 1986 computers were well past their prime, and have since been replaced with regular Windows PCs. The higher specifications of Master 128 micros meant that, with Shadow RAM fitted as standard, I could reclaim the 20 kB of memory that the framebuffer normally needed. The provision of primitive GUI elements in the program’s interface consumed a lot of memory for an 80s micro! The end result was nonetheless very positive.

The language staff at the school did have some interest in the project, and some of the them helped with testing, but generally I sat alone in the top floor of the languages building each afternoon until 5:30 pm working on the project, with no consultation or feedback. I do not honestly know whether the program was ever used; apparently it may have been but I do not know for certain. I have also wondered whether it was a viable concept in the first place; I have discussed this with one or two people more recently with knowledge about language teaching, and the general feelings I received were negative. There was a suggestion that it would help Chinese people learn the Latin alphabet. I cannot deny though that it was an interesting project for a couple of years, and was much more fun than revising for my GSCE examinations (for which I still got decent grades, despite having spent my time in year 11 programming instead of revising).

Thanks to Chris Richardson of 8-bit software, LSAIT Hangman is now available for download. Chris also provided me with all the screenshots on this page, taken from the BeebEm emulator, which replace the older digital camera pictures; however, you can still view photos of the main menu and the Hangman game running on my own BBC Master (a machine of which I am no longer in possession). I have also converted the original Microsoft Publisher 2 files that comprise the manual into a single PDF, while I still have a computer that will run Publisher 2! (Nothing else on the planet opens these files, and my main PC is 64-bit.)

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The package

The main menu

Main menu screen Main menu

When the package first loads, you are presented with the main menu, from which you can play a pre-saved wordlist, enter a list of words, or administer the disc. You will note that the program also credits David Mills; the inspiration for the graphics was his, and he gave me some help reading disc sectors later on during the project. We were planning to work on this together, but in the end I wrote virtually the whole package myself.

At the top of the screen you will see the disc title (“Administration”), the disc’s language setting (“German”) and an icon indicating that sound is enabled on that disc. The “language” of the disc simply selects which accented character set (if any) to use for the wordlists. At the bottom of the window, you get a bar listing which keys to press. This status bar is used throughout the package, for instructions, prompts, informative messages (as seen in the screenshot), and lists of options. Like with the dialog boxes, the package does not follow the conventions of WIMP GUI design.

You will also notice my peculiar version numbering scheme. Each program in the package has its own version number, so the package as a whole is just version 5.x. Worse, the package was version 4 at the beginning of development, and rolled over to 5.0 after reaching 4.9. Before the program had been completed the various module versions had reached 5.6–5.9! (Versions 1–3 were mine and David’s earlier Hangman programs).

LSAIT itself stands for “Lightning Software and Imagen Technologies”, some pretentious poo referring to David and myself respectively. The LSAIT logo—which was printed in the manual—looked good, though, as shown at the top of the page.

The game

Selecting a wordlist file to play Wordlist selection

The package works on the principle of “wordlists”: files containing a list of words, intended to be on a particular vocabulary topic such as shops or food. You begin a game by selecting a wordlist to play, presumably under teacher instruction (to match what has just been covered in class). Notice that the file list is displayed in a menu presented virtually as a dialog box, complete with a scroll bar. There are no scroll bars thumbs however, and instead of buttons, the status bar provides a key legend for the window.

A progress bar appears while the wordlist loads; I had to cut down the update frequency as it tied up the CPU and slowed down file loading considerably. The loading process itself was weird, and was the result of a general RAM shortage and no DLLs or overlays in BBC BASIC. The selection and loading process was done in one program, with the wordlist data stored into a preset area of RAM along with the filename. Some resident integer variables (which remain unchanged as you load another program) were set with the word count and request type parameters, and the game program was loaded in place of the existing program. The game program then read the variables left by the last program to know what it was expected to do (no command-line arguments in BASIC either) and accessed the wordlist data stored in RAM, including the filename so that it could tell the user what the wordlist was called. These processes of parameter and wordlist storage were used to fit a very large package into not that much RAM, switching between programs and sharing data across them; messy, but effective.

A new word to guess A new word

The game then begins, and you are presented with each word from the list in random order. After each user action, the program responds with a message in the status bar, and optionally an audible signal. Most response types have several available messages, from which one is chosen at random each time. If you get hanged, the game plays the funeral march, which might get annoying in a classroom! This is a good excuse for disabling sound in the game altogether.

The game takes a curious approach with accented characters. Accents are displayed on the screen, but do not need to be, and in fact cannot be entered during the game; pressing A, for example, will reveal all letter As in the word, regardless of accents. Accented characters are entered using the function keys during wordlist editing. These key bindings are ignored during a game; the one exception is the German sharp S “ß”, which must be entered using F7 as it is considered distinct from S. A printed function key legend was supplied with the package listing the key assignments for French and German diacritics and ß, to be inserted under the function key strip on the keyboard. This was an idea already used by another language package used at the school, but Hangman used different keys for the characters.

Not one of the right letters Incorrect guess
Word in the wordlist completed Word correct
Hanged! Hanged!

Administrator

Main adminstrator menu Main admin menu

The package is administered via a program on the disc called Administrator (formerly “File Administrator”, which lent it the filename “FA.b”), which lets you browse, rename, print, and delete wordlists, as well as configure the disc’s settings. This program makes extended use of windows for the various parts of the interface, in ways that considerably deviate from GUI convention.

Basic file operations are done with this application, and you can also select to play any wordlist from from the Administrator. Wordlist creation and editing is done using separate programs on the disc. Due to memory constraints, the disc configuration screen itself is done using another program: the main menu, started using a special parameter to tell it to show the configuration menu instead of the menu. The menu program was small and it left some RAM spare!

Administrator file menu The file menu
Disc settings configuration Disc config

Wordlist utilities

Wordlist creator Wordlist creator

The package comes with two programs for working with the contents of wordlists. The nameless word creator program can be used both to create temporary wordlists on the fly when invoked from the main menu or new wordlists on disc when invoked from the Adminstrator. The program requires you to know beforehand how many words you wish to use, and once a word is entered, you cannot go back and edit or remove it. This program was mostly intended as a quick way for teachers to enter new wordlists for the class, although it could have benefitted from a few design improvements.

Wordlist editor Wordlist editor

The other wordlist utility is the wordlist editor; this program is pretty self-explanatory, letting you create and edit wordlists. The editor is curiously the only other program to share the striped background design used by the game program.

Instead of having a scrolling list and scroll bars for the wordlist window, the program has a concept of “pages”. After you have entered the last word in the list box, you start on a blank page. The left and right arrow keys switch between available pages. The maximum amount of words that can be entered is 240; I forget the exact reason for this limit, but a large part of the restriction was simply how many words I could store in memory. I determined that limit empirically by switching off shadow screen mode and loading in the largest program on disc, and watching all the code in memory spill over into the area used as video memory. The portion of the screen not full of random dots was free space I could fill with words. However, I also had to leave some room for the BASIC stack; I realised this when I started getting strange wordlist corruption. Normally, I should have just allocated a block of RAM on the heap for the data, but that was of no use when the data had to remain in RAM while the next program loaded ready to be found, which was a process that would reset the stack and heap.