I decided this afternoon to write a Vectrex game for Christmas.

For a change, this is a word game rather than a shoot-'em-up:

                     Word Mastermind

A version of Mastermind (or as we call it in the UK, "Bulls and Cows")
that uses words instead of coloured pegs.

A letter in the correct position scores a "Bull".  After removing the
bulls from your guess and from the target word, each letter the two
words have in common scores a "Cow".

Before writing the Vectrex game, I quickly hacked up this version
using standard C and console I/O just to make sure I had the game
logic correct.  Now that I do (I hope), I'll convert it to a Vectrex
interface.

The prototype is written in 1960's programming style ;-)  In other
words, pretty ugly and lots of "goto"s...  This is what you get when
you try to cram writing a game in between dinner and suppertime.

Anyone who has a C compiler and would like to test the prototype
to ensure that it plays fairly and handles all contingencies, please
do, and report any problems back to me. (gtoal@gtoal.com)

I expect it'll compile on Windows as well as Linux.

The word list is all legit words albeit that many are rather obscure -
if you hit a word you don't believe is real, Google for it (eg "define tala").

The word list came from a version of this game we wrote on the MIT
Scratch system for kids, so a handful of more obvious four-letter words
have been removed.

Feedback is welcome to include any other missing words you might have
tried, that you think I should add.  But lets leave the obvious swear
words out so we can let our kids play this over Christmas.

Fetch, compile, and run with:

   wget http://gtoal.com/vectrex/mastermind/portable-version.c
   cc -o wmind portable-version.c
   ./wmind