CoCo Letters

Permalink: http://sarrazip.com/dev/coco-letters.html

By Pierre Sarrazin

CoCo Letters is Scrabble-like board game for the Tandy Color Computer 3.

The game is played against the computer. It uses a dictionary of words of 2 to 5 letters. It requires a CoCo 3 (real or emulated) with at least 128 kB of RAM and Disk Basic. RGB and composite monitors are supported.

The current version is 0.1.0 (2026-09-29).

I can be contacted (in French or English) at sarrazip at sarrazip dot com.

As of September 2026, the game has not been tested on a real CoCo. There may be updates to this project in the future.

Download

This program is distributed under the GNU General Public License (version 3 or later).

• Floppy disk image for Disk Basic (52 kB)
• To run the game under Disk Basic, uncompress this file, mount the .dsk file in drive 0 and give the DOS command on the CoCo.
• Source archive (88 kB)
  • Not required to play the game.
  • Requires CMOC for compilation (version 0.1.100 or later).
  • Requires these libraries (which are available on the CMOC home page):
    • bsound (version 0.1.4 or later);
    • bcontrol (version 0.1.6 or later);
    • decbfile (version 0.1.13 or later);

See SHA512 signatures for these and other files.

How To Play

Specify at the presentation screen if you are using an RGB or composite monitor by typing R or C. This setting can be changed later when the board is shown, by pressing Break followed by M, which will toggle between the two palettes.

To place a word, the user must position a cursor with the arrow keys, then press Enter, then specify the orientation of the word with the right or down arrows. Then the user must type the whole word, and press Enter.

The game forbids entering a word of more than 5 letters, or a word that would create an adjacent word of more than 5 letters.

The words played must be part of the game's dictionary of over 13,000 words, which is based on the public domain Enable list.

Press the Break key during the game to get help pages.

This game's dictionary may contain words that may be offensive to some players. Player discretion is advised.

Other resources

• CMOC, the 6809-targeting C-like cross-compiler I wrote and which is necessary to compile this game.
• CoCoSmash, a simplified clone of Astrosmash for the CoCo.
• Color Eights, a card game like Crazy Eights for the CoCo.
• Color Verbiste, a partial CoCo port of my French conjugator, also written with CMOC.
• My page on emulating the CoCo on a GNU/Linux system.
• XRoar, a Dragon and CoCo emulator.
• My home page.

Last update to this page: 2026-09-29 14:36:45 EDT