I have a 10-year old, Windows 3.1 version of Wordzap (see http://wordzap.com/ for the latest version) and it has survived all my hardware and Windows upgrades since then right up to Pentium III and Windows Me. Now parts of this wonderful word game are no longer legible.
Wordzap, like Scrabble, offers the players a limited set of stamp-sized, alphabetic tiles from which to form words. Again like Scrabble, each tile has a single black letter on it, but unlike Scrabble the tiles are coloured. The first and 11th tile are always white, the second and 15th are always cyan… The tile colour is meaningless to the game.
In Windows 98 (eg my laptop) the game is perfect. With the same executable and .dll, on my home PC, the game is unplayable because the first and 11th tiles are black instead of white. (Black letters on a black tile are, of course, useless.) All other tile colours are the same as on my laptop – three red, three purple, four blue and a grey.
I re-installed my home PC’s Windows Me on a freshly formatted hard disc five days ago. I was recovering from a miserable experience with the hidden cost of upgrading to Windows XP.
I hoped that the Wordzap problem would have vanished once I re-installed Windows Me, but it hasn’t. Ten minutes ago I re-copied the Wordzap program and dll files from my laptop to my home PC in case the backup previously used had been corrupted, but to no avail.
BTW, be warned!! Windows XP upgrades have a considerable hidden cost on some PCs. I found out the hard way that I needed new hardware to replace my unbranded fax modem, new software because Norton System Works 2001 is incompatible with Windows XP and my Acer 640P scanner won’t have an XP driver ready until the end of December. The only good to come out of it is that it has simplified the task of building my Christmas present wish-list.
Does anyone have the slightest idea what is going on with my Wordzap problem?
