Puzzle (Thomson MO, Thomson TO)

Puzzle is a very simple educational game about placing colored rectangles in the correct place to replicate a picture. It was released alongside several other educational programs teaching numbers and shapes.

Commented-Out Lines#

The following lines are present in the original MO5 tape release, as well as the TO9/TO8/TO9+ disk release from the Logiciels Nathan Ecoles : Mathématiques compilation.

The very first lines of PUZZLE.BAS are a huge reference sheet to the locations of the routines.

-----------------------
        PUZZLE
        
   5000 : TITRE
   6000 : INSTITUTEUR
  30000 : MENU
   8000 : INFORMATIONS
   9000 : BILAN
  10000 : PAGE ACTIVITE
  11000 : QUADRILLAGE
  20000 : DEFINITION DES PIECES
  21000 : DONNEES PUZZLES
  22000 : AFFICHAGE MODELE
  12000 : SAISIE PIECE
  13000 : DEPOSE PIECE
  14000 : REPRISE GRILLE
  15000 : REPRISE PIECE
  16000 : CORRIGE
  23000 : MELANGE
  30000 : MENU
  17000 : EFFACEMENT MODELE
  18000 : RESTITUTION MODELE
  19000 : FLECHE SUITE

Furthermore, the grid code (which starts at Line 11000) also has a reference for some of the parameters:

CX,CY DIMENSIONS CASE
DX,DY DIMENSIONS TABLEAU
COU COULEUR

Lastly, Line 30065 contains an unused box-drawing command which would have been toggled at the main menu.

'BOX(0,8)-(319,191),4

Revisonal Differences#

In 1986, a revision of this game was released as part of Cedic-Nathan's Logiciels Apprends-moi series. The key differences are as follows:

• The personalization screen which appears upon pressing Insert + ↵ Return in the main menu is no longer used for toggling which puzzles to appear, but rather to load puzzles from a file. Each file can hold 5 puzzles of each size. The base game has four files of this type, for a total of 100 puzzles, way more compared to the original game's 29 (9x 2x2, 9x 3x3, 6x 4x4, 3x 5x5, 2x 6x6).
• Side B of the cassette tape now has a level editor by which the player can create their own puzzles.
• Internally, each puzzle piece is now composed of four smaller pieces which resemble those of the original version. As such, all but one of the original game's puzzles were not retained in the revision. The one that was, 2x2 Puzzle 1, is File B 2x2 Puzzle 2 in the revision.

References#