A Puzzling Addition to the Platform

If you’re interested in puzzles (or if you stopped at my stand in Bristol on Saturday), then you might be aware of Simon Tatham’s Portable Puzzle Collection. It’s a set of 40 single-player games, mainly focussed around logic with the occasional piece of maths thrown in.

I first encountered the collection through its Android port, and since then have also played it on Linux. As it is described as “portable” (and since there are also ports for Windows, iOS, MacOS and other platforms as well) I felt that what RISC OS really needed was one of its own – which it now (mostly) has.

Copies of the test version which I had on display at the South West Show are now available to download from my website. It’s currently a work in progress, although 39 of the 40 games appear to be playable (the 40th throws floating point exceptions on starting up, which I need to investigate, and so isn’t included in the test release). There is a list of known bugs and omissions from the RISC OS port in the supplied documentation – the biggest being the lack of any user guide or instructions for the games.

For now, that last omission can be overcome by reading the RISC OS-specific information that comes with the port, and finding the rest of the documentation on Simon’s website. Key presses and mouse actions are identical between the desktop ports (mobile ones can be different), and the RISC OS port’s interface should hold few surprises for our platform’s regular users.

If anyone does have a play with the games, I’m interested in feedback and bug reports — there’s a list of known issues in the RISC OS documentation. Please assume that all bugs are in the RISC OS-specific code, and report them to me.

I must finish by saying “Thank You” to Simon and the other contributors to the collection, both for making such an interesting set of games available completely free of charge and for making them so easily portable that it’s been possible to get a RISC OS version running in only around six weekends’ worth of work and without making any changes to the upstream code.

There’s still a lot of work to do, but it would be nice to think that the RISC OS version of Puzzles could reach another milestone in time for the next date in the platform’s calendar.

Edit: I should probably add a screenshot, since I have one to hand…

Only played a few of these games so far on Risc OS but may I say a massive thank you for bringing these games to my favourite platform.