WordHopper

WordHopper is a stylish arcade word game, designed specifically for early-Pentium-era systems running MS-DOS.

Starting at the center of a randomly-generated grid of letters, spell the longest word you can. Race against the clock and keep up a streak in Classic mode, go for high scores within the 5-minute blocks of Rush mode, or take your time and spell even longer words in Zen mode. Not satisfied? Tweak game parameters to your liking in Custom mode.

Features a valid word list spanning ~60K words, well-polished visuals, and OPL3-compatible music- all fitting comfortably on your typical high-density floppy diskette.

Purchase comes with pre-configured DOSBox environments for play on modern systems running Linux or Windows.

System Requirements (DOS)

	Minimum	Recommended
CPU	i486DX2/SX2* @ 40MHz (FPU REQUIRED)	Pentium 66, 75, or equivalent
RAM	6MB (DOS), 12MB (Windows⁑)	-
Video	VGA Mode 13h-capable display adapter	-
Audio	Sound Card with OPL2 (Adlib) or MIDI-out (MPU-401) for music, Sound Blaster-compatible for sound effects	Sound Blaster-compatible with OPL3
Keyboard	if it has alphanumeric keys, arrow keys, backspace, enter, and ESC, you're good	Keyboard with numpad and/or at least 3-key rollover
Mouse	Optional; requires at least 1 button and a driver, like cutemouse	STEALX™ DeathWish Precision 20-button RGB Gaming Mouse. idk mice are mice
OS	MS-DOS 3.0 or later	-
Disk	At least 1 MB free	-

*: The minimum CPU requirement varies wildly from system to system. For instance, a 40MHz 486DX2 system of mine runs the game at a tolerable speed, meanwhile one player's 63MHz Pentium Overdrive struggled to run the game. If you intend on playing via real hardware, please try the provided demo before buying.

⁑: Playing under Win3.x/9x might be unstable. The game should run fine, but if exiting leaves the system in an unstable state, that's your cue to stick to DOS mode. (If you've written games with Allegro and might know why this is, let me know!)

System Requirements (everything else)

The preconfigured DOSBox builds require at least a recent-ish Linux distro, or Windows 7. They also require a CPU with the SSE4.2 instruction set. If your system fails to meet these requirements, you can manually set up the DOS version in a different version of DOSBox instead.

Also available is a (very limited) demo version, intended for testing performance on real hardware before purchase. The demo is classified as shareware; spread it around if you'd like!

Mac users: The OS X build is for PowerPC Macs, not Intel or Apple Silicon. If you're on a modern Mac, you'll need to manually set up DOSBox (or one of its many forks) to run the DOS version. You can try this with the demo build of the game before buying.

Credits

design, programming, and art by kokoscript

music by cosmopawt

Originally created for the DOS Games June 2023 Jam.

Uses Chivo Mono from Omnibus-Type, released under v1.1 of the SIL Open Font License.