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Game Boy Wordle clone: How to compress 12972 five-letter words to 17871 bytes

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Re: Game Boy Wordle clone: How to compress 12972 five-letter words to 17871 bytes

#43
I got nerd sniped and compressed it to under 28K, which was good enough for the goal of fitting it in a 32K NROM cartridge for the NES. On the NES, you don’t need to do better than that, because you get a separate 8K for graphics, and 4K is plenty of space to fit the code for your Wordle clone.

https://www.moria.us/blog/2022/01/dictionary-compression

The annoying part is that the NES only gives you four background palettes, and you are constrained to use all four of those to color your words.

Re: Game Boy Wordle clone: How to compress 12972 five-letter words to 17871 bytes

#44

Bug? See screenshot. My 5th guess shouldn’t have gone down like that for a conventional Wordle clone. https://ibb.co/93CdVWv

Black is right letter right spot. Green is right letter wrong spot.

Ahh thanks for this. Found it super confusing!

Re: Game Boy Wordle clone: How to compress 12972 five-letter words to 17871 bytes

#45
I once came across a calculator-like device that had some version of a Bible stored in it. But not very well. It clearly had a dictionary with the text stored by word number, because some of the longer words were off by one word in the dictionary. This produced some strange texts.

Re: Game Boy Wordle clone: How to compress 12972 five-letter words to 17871 bytes

#46
post #45

I once came across a calculator-like device that had some version of a Bible stored in it. But not very well. It clearly had a dictionary with the text stored by word number, because some of the longer words were off by one word in the dictionary. This produced some strange texts.

I think that in this case, the original text is rather strange to start with.

Re: Game Boy Wordle clone: How to compress 12972 five-letter words to 17871 bytes

#49

The colors are misleading in my opinion. Green usually signifies something is correct. You should have used yellow for misplaced letters instead. I had CRAN? in the second row, but I lost the game, because it was RANCH.

lol yes, I played it and was so confused, the colors are literally backwards!

Re: Game Boy Wordle clone: How to compress 12972 five-letter words to 17871 bytes

#50
post #40

Over on http://golf.horse/ there are leaderboards for finding the smallest Javascript programs that output various word lists, including the Wordle list. I've found it to be a fun and educational challenge. I would be excited to see more submissions!

Interesting that page suggests that the wordle dictionary is 'at most 11.11 bits per word', which works out to 18015 bytes, slightly higher than was achieved here. Golf.horse is measuring the payload plus the compressor, which I don't believe the author is doing, and is important when trying to be objective about the relative strength of solutions. Otherwise you can store the entire file out of band in the compressor…

The other major difference is that golf.horse requires the payload to be valid uft8 javascript, which means your binary blobs are essentially limited to base64 encoded strings. You might manage slightly better, but I suspect the limit is somewhere around 6.5bits per byte.

On the gameboy, you have the advantage of being able to use the full 8 bits per byte.

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