WordOak

WordOak is a word guessing game for the Archimedes and RiscPC line of computers, in the style of Wordle. You can play a daily game, of course, as well as freeplay games.

Part of Wordle's success is down to the easy ability to share the results of a common puzzle. In a similar vein, each WordOak game you play has a numeric seed that you can give to others, who can then recreate that same game and try their hand at it. You can also get WordOak to make a seed from an input word of your choice.

It should run on any machine running RISC OS 3.1 or higher, physical or virtual, although it hasn't been tested on RISC OS 4+. You don't need anything to run the game that isn't already part of the OS.

There are two forms of download, depending on where you plan on running WordOak:

• The HostFS archive is a Zip archive ideal for PC/Mac emulators with a HostFS filesystem. Extract it to a folder within your emulator's hostfs folder, and you're good to go.
• The Spark archive is for native RISC OS extraction. Use this if you want to play WordOak on a real RISC OS machine; take the self-extracting copy of SparkPlug if you need it.

• The game window is too tall to fit completely on smaller screen resolutions; the window may need to scroll if you use more than four guesses. WordOak will scroll for you, if it needs to, when you input a guess.
• WordOak can only hold up to six games in memory at once (one of those slots is reserved for the daily game).
• The font used in the guess row will get the wrong aspect ratio if you change to a screen mode with a different pixel aspect ratio while the app is running. For old-school screen modes, for example, this happens when switching between modes 12 and 27. RISC OS 3.5 and up prefer using square pixels at all times, so you probably won't run into this.
• Game window redraw is not fast on older CPUs.

If you have a question, or have found an issue, let me know on Mastodon or BlueSky. I'd love to know if someone actually plays this version of the game on the reg.