Vic Rice's 1987 DOS Scrabble Game

As seen on Usenet, BBSes, and Shareware CDs

The Scrabble FAQ, which was posted monthly to the Usenet newsgroups rec.games.board, rec.puzzles.crosswords, rec.answers and news.answers, makes mention of:

Vic Rice's Game (IBM PC) - This goes under the name "Scrabble" but for clarity, I'm denominating it according to its author's name

This DOS game was originally distributed on BBSes (Ed Hopper's - 713-782-5454) in 1987, and then various Shareware CDROMs as sperscbl.arj, sperscbl.zip, scrabb11.zip, scrabble.zip, SCRABBLE.EXE, EGASCRAB.ZIP.

Screenshot

Getting crushed by the computer player to get a quick screenshot looks like this in DOSBox:

DOSBox running SCRABBLE.EXE with the default dictionary showing some words played in a game.

The SCRABBLE.DOC or SCRABBLE.TXT distributed with the game says that the game features an "auxillary" dictionary feature, where if a word is not known by the dictionary, the game will prompt for it to be added to NEWWORDS.TXT, and that dictionary will be searched also.


P.S. Oops, one last item. During play if you enter a word not found in the
internal dictionary, you will be asked if indeed it is a real word. If you
answer "YES", the word is added to the file "NEWWORDS.TXT". This is the
auxiliary dictionary file searched if no match is found in the main
dictionary. "NEWWORDS.TXT" is a standard ASCII file which you can edit and
      modify to suit your needs.

What is curious about this statement is that the game does not search NEWWORDS.TXT, which has left long standing players with an accumulation of additional words that are never searched. The why for this is probably lost to time. Was this a removed feature? A planned feature left out of the release? I looked through the executable disassembly using IDA Free but could only see the function that writes to NEWWORDS.TXT when the game prompts for a word to be saved, not any function that reads from the same file.

Files:

Directory of C:\.

AUTOEXEC BAT                737 04-10-1987 14:57
AUTOSCRB BAT                 18 12-12-1987 21:07
DOC_CD   BAT                 19 12-01-1991 15:59
FILE_ID  DIZ                154 22-01-2011 16:14
NEWWORDS TXT                379 12-12-1987 20:26
RESET    COM              1,024 11-03-1987 15:49
RUN_CD   BAT                 14 12-01-1991 13:20
SCRAB    BAT                190 12-12-1987 21:12
SCRABB   BAT                 77 12-12-1987 21:07
SCRABBLE DCT            101,120 15-04-1983  8:33
SCRABBLE EXE             40,148 22-03-1987 14:25
SCRABBLE TXT              2,091 12-12-1987 20:46
   13 File(s)           145,971 Bytes.
    2 Dir(s)        262,111,744 Bytes free.

      

What is interesting is that the game's main dictionary, SCRABBLE.DCT is dated to 1983, but the game EXE is dated to 1987. Which raises some potential questions, but chiefly what is the provenance of the 1983 DCT file given the time gap?

Well for one, some versions of the game distribution have the first bytes of the DCT file stripped out, but others have it in place. The good header identifies the DCT file as "MicroStar SpellStar 1.0", which was a companion spell checking program to the popular WordStar. WordStar was a popular word processor that started out on CP/M in 1978, and then had an assembly port to DOS, by MicroPro's Ireland offshoot, even though "It wasn't clear at first how successful the IBM PC would be." More recently, a later 4.0 version of WordStar achieved notoriety with George R. R. Martin sharing in 2014 on Conan O'Brien that he uses DOS WordStar for writing.

A screenshot of WordStar for DOS.
A screenshot of WordStar for DOS


Welcome to SpellStar, featuring a DCT file, from
SpellStar Reference Manual Release 3.3 (1983)
Welcome to SpellStar from SpellStar Reference Manual Release 3.3 (1983)

Thinking

Given that Vic Rice's Game uses a SpellStar dictionary from 1983, it could be that Vic Rice was a CP/M user, or a DOS WordStar + SpellStar user, or maybe had a DOS PC with a Z80 add-on board for CP/M, or a NEC V20/V30 owner which supported both DOS and CP/M, and decided to use a known dictionary format for sake of convenience/interop with SpellStar.

Download Shareware utils

Ever wanted to list the words in this scrabble game? Well, now you can without needing to use the ancient MicroPro SpellStar software, using standalone utilities.

The game loaded with a custom wordlist based on /usr/share/dict/words from Linux (minus a few suffixes (IST, IED, ING), and accented characters):
A screenshot of Vic Rice's game with a custom wordlist from /usr/share/dict/words on Linux

Download DCTTOOLS.ZIP and run under DOSBox

* but be sure to backup your files to avoid accidental damage. The following text can be found by running README.BAT:


	    Tools for modifying Vic Rice's Game/SCRABBLE.EXE dictionary.
                              by gamedevjeff
                              Version 15122024
                            THIS IS SHAREWARE.
                            
             *** ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR GAME FILES BEFORE MODIFYING ***

1.  SETDICT.EXE

This tool modifies an executable to load a different .DCT filename.
example: SETDICT SCRABBLE.EXE NEW.DCT
Now, SCRABBLE.EXE will look for NEW.DCT instead of the default SCRABBLE.DCT

2. DCTBUILD.EXE

This tool builds a new DCT file given an ASCII (A-Z only) word list.
Example: DCTBUILD.EXE MYWORDS.TXT MYWORDS.DCT

Note:
    Lists greater than 65535 words in length are not supported or tested.
    The DCT file format stores the total stored word count as a 16-bit
    unsigned integer, which cannot represent numbers higher than this.
    Trim your word list to under 65535 words.

3. DCTDUMP.EXE

This tool will dump the entries from a .DCT file into an ASCII wordlist.
Example: DCTDUMP.EXE SCRABBLE.DCT SCWORDS.TXT

FAQ:

Q. Why doesn't the game use words that exist in NEWWORDS.TXT?
A. Not sure, maybe it was an unreleased idea or removed.

Q. I want to make a new wordlist using NEWWORDS.TXT and the default dictionary.
A. Make sure there are no duplicates in NEWWORDS.TXT then:

DCTDUMP.EXE SCRABBLE.DCT SCWORDS.TXT
TYPE SCWORDS.TXT NEWWORDS.TXT > COMBINED.TXT
DCTBUILD.EXE COMBINED.TXT COMBINED.DCT
SETDICT COMBINED.DCT
SCRABBLE.EXE
	    
      

Email: g d j -at- p i x e l t u r k e y dot c o m