Many years ago I set up a disused Pentium 4 desktop with Debian as an emulator console connected to our TV. The system served well enough – I played through all of Chrono Trigger on it, at least – but it has a particular problem, which is that the motherboard is saddled with the pathetic i740-based “Intel 3D Graphics” system from 2001.. At the time when 1024×768 was a high-end gaming resolution, this machine cannot even reach 60fps at 1920×1080 of an HD panel – certainly CPU scaling is a dead end, and in my testing even a “full screen quad” (one 1920×1080 textured 3d polygon, the “accelerated” way to do hardware scaling these days) doesn’t hit the full framerate.

Yet somehow, both Snes9x’s X11 mode and the DOSBox in “Overlay” render mode can manage it. The secret is the “Xv” or “XVideo extension”, where graphics chips enabled a specific route for sending YUV streams to the card, and custom hardware managed scaling to fill almost any screen size. This was, obviously, for video – especially DVD, which is already YUV format, the hardware offload from DVD directly into graphics card into full-screen presentation saved a lot of CPU cycles back in the day. But you could use it with anything producing a YUV format image, including games or applications: Snes9x supports it directly in the unix port, while DOSBox’s SDL1-based system uses functions that ultimately map to this feature.

I’d like to add more emulators to the system, but finding any that use this is a major challenge. Most don’t use X11 direct programming at all, instead depending on a framework like SDL or GTK to provide cross-platform support. And SDL 1.2 was superseded by SDL 2.0 in 2013: the former no longer receives maintenance and is heavily discouraged for new developments. SDL2 dropped support for YUV overlays, a relic of a bygone era before GPUs could easily manage the task. My options seemed to be:

• Add code myself to each emulator to support Xv functions (nightmare)
• Replace the computer with something newer (but why? it’s close to working as is…)

A third option occurred to me though: many emulators also can be built as a “RetroArch core”, which means the emulation guts are contained in a library, and the I/O is supposed to be handled by the “frontend” application instead. The interface between these is something called “Libretro”. Since the emulators communicate in a standardized way, and I supply the video output, could I write a “frontend” that uses legacy SDL1 and displays the frames with its YUV overlay support?

Hasbro’s Em@il Games Scrabble does not come with a dictionary. Instead, checking words for validity is done by the server, and only when a player challenges a play. This was probably for a few reasons – reducing the client download size, allowing Hasbro to update it as needed, and as a safeguard to keep the word list out of public circulation.

This means I need to provide my own dictionary for Hasbro PBEM Proxy to support the game. It seemed a simple enough problem: just get a word list from somewhere, and hook it up. But which one? I started by using CSW21, the latest (at the time) list of competitively accepted words. Yet this bothered me as it seems anachronistic: the game released on Feb. 5, 1999, so shouldn’t the word list be equally contemporary?

Thus begins another great (and probably foolish) journey into software archaeology. “What dictionary were people using in 1999?” turns out to be a complicated question, due to the fact that different lists were used for casual vs tournament play, US vs UK, short vs long words, etc. and unification of these was not really a priority at the time. Plus, some of the word lists remain unavailable unless you were a paying member of NASPA or another Scrabble professional organization. Besides, even if I had the word lists, is there any certainty that those were the ones backing the Em@il Games service?

I decided to try a different approach. Presumably, Hasbro had provided the dictionary to the developers that they wanted to be used. It makes sense that they would use the same dictionary in other branded Scrabble products at the time. In 1996 Random Games and Hasbro released a version of Scrabble on CD-ROM, helmed by lead developer Brian Sheppard (who had independently created a top performing shareware Scrabble AI called “Maven” two years before, and been hired by Hasbro to run this project — after discontinuing his own version, of course!) Three years later, “Scrabble Version 2.0” came out, with a complete redesign of the UI and a higher resolution gameplay. This version did not run well on Windows XP, so in 2002 Hasbro released “Scrabble Complete”, a slight rebuild of 2.0 with XP support and a few new background images.

As these products neatly bracket the release of Em@il Games Scrabble, I sought to get the word lists from each, and see how they stacked up to dictionaries in use.