scrabble.mombe.org scrabble.mombe.orgIn late 2002 my then significant other (now my wife) and I temporarily lived in different countries. We'd enjoyed playing Scrabble when we were together, and wanted to continue the tradition despite the distance. Having spent amy a fruitless day trying to find an online, Windows based Scrabble game I gave up and started writing one.
The fruits of my labour are archived here, in the hopes that someone else gets the same enjoyment out of them that we did.
If you're trying to get this to work on a windows box, the simplest way to do it is to grab the latest windows installer and run it on your machine. It'll create the necessary directories, etc for you.
If you want to do it by hand, get the latest scrabble-*.zip and unzip it on your machine. Copy the MSWINSCK.OCX and msvbvm60.dll to your system directory (C:\Windows, whatever), and the Scrabble.exe file to wherever you wish.
You only need to get the OCX and dll once, they never change. You probably don't need them with Windows XP as I think they're included. Scrabble.exe in this directory is always the latest windows client.
If you're looking to get this to work under *nix get the tar.gz file or one of the pre-compiled binaries (Linux or FreebSD, both require ncurses). RTFM. You can also compile up the client yourself. There are sources for the server there too, if you wish to run your own server.
The scrabble server running on scrabble.mombe.org has some of my own modifications to this source code (as does the *nix client :). There are some protocol extensions, although they should be backwards compatible.
I discovered in March 2005 that there is another windows client, written by a Nova Satori. If you're interested, have a look at http://www.virelai.net/scribble/. It might be a better bet than my client, since it's seen some development over the last three years ;-)
In windows, double-click on the Scrabble® logo for a list of keystrokes.
On *nix, RTFM.
Communicating is very IRC like (surprise, surprise). Just remember that public messages are truely public — across all games.
Connect to scrabble.mombe.org
The server runs on TCP port 7096 (you can omit this on all the clients, it is the default. It's just documented here so you know what to get through your firewall).
The protocol is described in protocol.txt.
Server limit is currently 8 games, 4 players a game.
Everything here is subject to the usual disclaimers — no warranties, etc. You use it, anything bad that happens that happens is your fault. That said, I don't think it'll break anything, please let me know if it does. You should probably read the full licence agreement.
Scrabble.exe is written by me and is freely distributable. I'm not planning on making it open-source. People interested in the source can talk to me.
The contents of scrab-v18.tar.gz were written by someone else. No licence conditions are specified in the distribution (nor is an author for that matter). I have reason to believe that it might be one Dave Holland at Harvard University, but I'm not sure of that.
The OCX and dll files belong to Micro$loth and you'll have to donate your left testicle to Bill Gates to be allowed to use them.
Scrabble® (the game) is copyright J.W. Spears & Sons. They don't know about, or necessarily approve of, this online version. You can find more information about the Scrabble® board game at http://www.scrabble.com/.
Let me know about bugs, I might fix them if I have time. The server occasionally crashes, and I sometimes don't notice that. Let me know if this is the case, and I'll restart it.
- Guy -- Dept of Computer Science, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa Email: guy@zanet.net Web: http://mombe.org/ IRC: rm-rf@irc.zanet.net *** ANSI Standard Disclaimer *** J.A.P.H