Solvit-Plus 3 A Review by Timothy Swenson Geoff Wicks has upgraded Solvit-Plus 2 to a full Pointer Environment program and called it Solvit-Plus 3. This review will cover Solvit-Plus 3 and point out the differences between it and Solvit-Plus 2. INTRODUCTION For those that don't know what Solvit-Plus is, it's a program designed to assist in various word games, such as Scrabble, Jumble, and Crossword puzzles. It allows for 4 different types of word searches on a dictionary; Wild Card, Anagram, In Word, and Scramble (Scrabble). Each search is different in what information you have to find a specific word. The Wild Card search is great for Crossword puzzles where you know how many letters are in the word, but only a few of the letters. Anagram search is used for solving jubbled up words that you must figure out the real word. Besides an English dictionary, other languages are available, such as Dutch, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Welsh, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and American. For non-native English speakers, the only differences between English and American is a few changes in spelling (i.e. color instead of colour). THE PACKAGE The entire package consists of three disks (2 DD and one HD) and a 16-page A4 manual. The disks are labeled as such: MASTER DISK 1 - Non-Pointer Version, Word List. This disk includes a couple example BOOT files, some extensions that need to be loaded, the Solvit-Plus 2 executable, and a medium English dictionary (64,500 words). MASTER DISK 2 - Pointer Version, Utilities. The disk includes the Solvit-Plus 3 executable, and two utilities, detokenize_obj and unzip. MASTER DISK 3 - Mega-Dictionary This disk contains a zip file of the LARGE English dictionary ( 253,000 words) and requires an ED drive or larger to unzip. Disk 1 is pretty much what came with Solvit-Plus 2. Solvit-Plus 2 requires two different extensions to be loaded and comes with example BOOT files. The Solvit-Plus 3 version does not require any other extensions other than the Pointer Environment ones. This makes it simple to load from the start. THE MANUAL The manualis the same that came with the Solvit-Plus 2 and has not been updated to include Solvit-Plus 3. For someone new to the program, I would recommend using the Solvit-Plus 2 first, following the manual exactly, and the move on to Solvit-Plus 3 when you become familiar with Solvit-Plus 2 and how it works. The "Quick Start" section works as-is for the Solvit-Plus 2, but will not work for Solvit-Plus 3. There are a few items that need to be done to get Solvit-Plus 3 running. Solvit-Plus 3 reads in a definition (or configuration) file (solvit_def) that defines how Solvit-Plus runs. The default file has the program looking on FLP1_ for the dictionary file. Since the Solvit-Plus 3 is on Disk 2 and the dictionary is on Disk 1, this will not work. You need to it all setup so that the program can read the dictionary file when it executes. One way to do this is to copy the executable and dictionary onto a working disk and run it from there. It looks like they both should be able to fit on one 720K disk. Another option is to put the dictionary file someplace else and change the solvit_def file to point to where the dictionary now is. This is basically what I did. I copied the english_dic file to RAM1_. I then used a text editor, such as QED or QD, and changed the one line to point to RAM1_english_dic. I then put in Disk 2 and executed Solvit-Plus 3. The program read the definition file, went to RAM1_ to read the dictionary file and was off and running. I believe the program reads the dictionary file into memory, so I really had two copies of the dictionary in memory. With a 2 Meg Gold Card system, this was not much of a problem. DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SOLVIT-PLUS 2 & 3 Before going too far I wanted to point out the key differences between Solvit-Plus 2 & 3. There are a lot of features in version 2 that are not in version 3. Since both version 2 and 3 come in the same package, I don't see it as a major problem, I just wanted to point them out. Solvit-Plus 2 supports six different ways to search to dictionary. Solvit-Plus 3 only supports 4 and leaves out Backward and Palindrome. It does not allow you to check a text file for spelling errors. It also does not allow you to import a text file as a dictionary or to generate a number of staticical figures on a dictionary. To keep the development time down, it looks as if Geoff Wicks took the core part of Solvit-Plus and moved that part to the Pointer Environment version. A decision was made that balanced features versus effort to provide in version 3. Since version 2 is included in the whole package, there is no loss of functionality to the user. Any one wishing the older features can still use them. RUNNING THE SOLVIT-PLUS 3 Once the program comes up it pretty much takes up the whole screen. The obvious PE options are there; the move item and the sleep/button item. I've seen a number of PE programs that do not support being a button, so it is nice to see this feature. The four main search options are to the left of the screen. Below that is the Help and Paramaters items. Paramaters is what Defauts used to be in version 2. The bottom of the screen has an item for selecting the Word List (dictionary). There are also some greyed out items for Main Menu, New Search, Page Up and Page Down. Any items that are not selectable are greyed out and do not function. The rest of the screen is a window to display the results of searches. Starting a dictionary search is as easy as selecting the item of the search you want. My first try was a Wild Card search. I moved the mouse to that item and hit the Hit/Left button (the Do/Right button will also work). A small window pops up asking for the query string. If you selected this item by mistake, just hitting return will take you back to the main menu. To test out Solvit-Plus 3 I grabbed the Bonus Crossword puzzle from my local paper and started working on it. I found one word that gave me trouble, so I decided it would be a good test for Solvit-Plus 3. The clue was "Theater Feature" and was a 6 letter word. I knew that the 2nd letter was C, the 3rd was R, the 5th was E and the 6th was N. The query string I entered was "?cr?en". The small query window went away and the main window on the screen went black (from being grey) and the words that matched the query were displayed. In this case it was the one word "screen", which seemed to be the answer I was looking for. I next tried the query string "??f?ld". To do another search, I just selected the New Search item. I could have selected Main Menu and WildCard, but one click is better than two. This query brought up three words, but I did not know if they were the ones I wanted. My next search was for the query string "?ig??". This search brought up a bunch of words, so many that Solvit-Plus 3 had to stop finding them and display what it had already found. When I was done reading that list, I just select Page Down to get the rest of the results. When I was done with all of my searches, I selected the Main Menu item. When I did these tests, I also timed them with my watch. Each search took about 7 seconds. The third search took about 6 seconds to return a screen full of words and then a few seconds more after I selected Page Down. I ran the same tests using Solvit-Plus 2 and came up with about the same timing, just about 7 seconds. Since I am using a Gold Card, your timings will vary depending on your platform. The other searches are: Anagram, In Word, and Scramble. In Word is used to find words that can be formed from the query word. Scramble another name for Scrabble, and finds all words that contain all the letters of the query word. The Help item brings up a 4 screen help display. Moving though the Help screens is done by the Page Down item. The screens give a brief explanation of each search, the Paramater options, and the Word List. The Help information is stored in the program and not on a file on disk. This is helpfull as I turn off my disk drive often. Since the disk drive has it's own power supply and fan, I turn it off to keep down the noise. The Parameter item is used to change the program defaults. Things that can be changed are: Sound On/Off, Word Length, Colors, Printer, Device, and Word List. These options are changed in the program instead of in a Config Block. When you save the Paramaters they are saved in the "solvit3_def" file. Since this configuration file is just a text file, you could edit it, but I would only edit it for something like the Word List. Some of the other options are just numbers and its hard to tell what you might be changing. So, edit it at your own risk. THINGS I'D LIKE SEE The biggest failing I saw was the lack of any update to the manual. Granted that once a user knows how to use version 2, version 3 is pretty easy. Some coverage of the configuration file and how it affects start up could be covered. An UPDATE_DOC file could be created or a short version 3 printed manual could be included. Once the user is past the initial installation then any questions can be answered in the version 2 manual. SUMMARY It's pretty obvious that the main point behind Solvit-Plus 3 was to take the main features of the version 2 and adapt them to the Pointer Environment. No new features were added. Actually, quite the opposite, some features were removed. The program ran well. The only "crash" was an "out of memory" error. I was running Solvit-Plus 3, Xchange, and had the dictionary file in memory. When I selected the Paramaters item I ran out of memory. I think this is one of the few times I've ever used up all of my 2 Meg. Obviously I did not really put the program to a thorough test. I'm sure that are bound to be a few bugs found, but as the core part of the program probably has not changed between the versions, the only bugs that should appear will be releated to the Pointer Environment screens. Since Solvit-Plus 3 includes Solvit-Plus 2, I don't know if there is any increase in the price, nor do I know what the policy is for owners of Solvit-Plus 2 ( they don't tell things like that to us reviews). If you are a current user of Solvit-Plus and use the Pointer Environment, I would recommend getting version 3. Using the same consistant PE interface speeds up the program. If you do not use the PE then you really are not missing out on any new features. As for non-owners of Solvit-Plus, base any purchase on your need. Its all a matter of having or not having the patience to wait the next day for the answers.