Home of Typespeed - hn Reader

Test your typing speed and get your fingers' CPS.

News

2008-08-13 Tobias Stoeckmann
Quite some time has passed, and a new reliability release had to be created due to miss management of memory, as well as some portability fixes. If you don't have a good reason to stay with an older version, please upgrade. With this version, you can also reorder high score list, if you want to grade accuracy higher than speed or points, for example.
2007-12-01 Tobias Stoeckmann
Reliability fix for 0.6.3 in network code: If a malicious packet is sent to typespeed, a division by zero is possible. Beside of that, a big news for everyone is that tCPS has been dropped, WPM added. Also the status bar can be adjusted much better in locales.
2007-11-09 Tobias Stoeckmann
0.6.3 is out. If you like to play with your friends, I realy urge you to update due to massive rework of network code. There were a lot of problems in it. Some bugs have been notified by mail, others I have noticed by myself and of course some others were spotted in the code. Beside of that, a french translation is included, an italian one is in development. Of course other bugs have been fixed, so please update if you don't have a good reason to not do so.
2007-09-15 Tobias Stoeckmann
Although it might seem there was no activity on typespeed, this is not true. Right now I try to get in a very nice network code in order to solve bugs, and client support in a way that word lists are parsed from server. Why I write this news is that we switched IRC server due to problems some people had on old one. Feel free to hang out with us, it's fun!
2007-06-01 Tobias Stoeckmann
I have to admit that I included a lot of bugs with 0.6.1 and I am sorry for not supplying 0.6.2 earlier. I have got contacted by some users that typo ratio is measured wrong, i.e. a finishing enter or space has been considered a typo. Beside of these bug fixes, you can supply a random seed from an earlier game to typespeed. This way you can compete against other players much better, because words come in predictable.

About

Typespeed's idea is ripped from ztspeed (a DOS game made by Zorlim). The Idea behind the game is rather easy: type words that are flying by from left to right as fast as you can. If you miss 10 or more words, game is over.

You can play typespeed for your own or with a friend using TCP/IPv4. These options are called Single player and Multiplayer respectively.

Single player: In this mode you can play for yourself and try to get a place in your top 10 list. As you enter correct words, the speed will increase, so watch out. You can even pause the game if you are skilled enough to play so long that you need a little break. In Single player, you can adjust the game as you wish through a mechanism known as game rules. These are simple configuration files in which you specify how fast the game is, how many words can be left out until game over and many other things.
Multiplayer: If you are brave enough to use our current network code (or sit in LAN with your friends), you can experience the most fun of typespeed: challenge an opponent. During the game, written words by you or your opponent will be thrown into the opposite game, so words can be strategicaly used to make life of your opponent even harder.

Typespeed is written in C and uses curses to display the menu and game. The network code is written using core library functions.

Generally any POSIX-compatible system with a curses library and some advanced functions (like snprintf(), etc.) should work, although development concentrates on GNU/Linux (x86_64) and ncurses. Feel free to contribute patches for your system, too! Beside of that the following systems have been tested and/or have maintained ports:

Cygwin
FreeBSD
GNU/Linux (various distributions)
Mac OS X
OpenBSD
Windows

Download

Please refer to your system's handbook how to install an available port of typespeed. If you want to compile typespeed from source, please remember that you need working development tools (gcc, make, curses headers, and so on).

If you are interested in previous versions of typespeed, please look at download page for typespeed on sourceforge.net.

Date	Source Code	Fedora Core 6	Mandriva 2008	PS2 Linux	Slackware	Windows
2008-08-13	typespeed-0.6.5.tar.gz				yes	yes
2007-12-01	typespeed-0.6.4.tar.gz					yes
2007-11-02	typespeed-0.6.3.tar.gz		yes	yes		yes
2007-06-01	typespeed-0.6.2.tar.gz	yes		yes	yes	yes
2007-03-16	typespeed-0.6.1.tar.gz	yes		yes	yes	yes
2007-01-19	typespeed-0.6.0.tar.gz			yes	yes	yes

Fedora Core 6 - rpm

Maintained by: Andrew Ziem

Mandriva 2008 - rpm

Maintained by: Nicolas Vigier

PS2 Linux - rpm

Maintained by: Tobias Stoeckmann

Slackware - tgz

Maintained by: Kanedaaa Bohater

For more information or newer versions, visit http://kaneda.bohater.net/slackware/packages/.

Windows (32 Bit) - zip

Maintained by: Tobias Stoeckmann

These packages are compiled with MinGW 5.1.3 and pdcurses on Windows XP. Version 0.6.3 and newer also include parts of gettext 0.16.1 and libiconv 1.11 as DLLs. All required changes that had to be done are available in zip (in directory "docs"). Please note that not all functionality of typespeed is included in this port yet.

Release Notes

0.6.3 - Network Changes

The format of network messages has changed in order to ease the debugging, also it has less bugs than before. This means that previous versions won't work with 0.6.3, but now you will be informed about this during connect.

0.6.0 - High score file format has changed (yet again):

The high score file format has changed yet again. This means that you have to convert your old high scores to new format. Unfortunately, due to new saved values, old high scores are very imprecise (mostly due to float precision and alike). If you convert your old scores, please respect that cps and tcps can (and almost will) vary. You should convert only if you realy want to keep your old scores!

Usage:

$ cd typespeed-0.6.0
$ make convert
...
$ # for typespeed < 0.5.0
$ ./convert /usr/local/share/typespeed/high.* /usr/local/var/games/typespeed.score
$ # for typespeed 0.5.0 - 0.5.3
$ ./convert /usr/local/var/games/typespeed/high.* /usr/local/var/games/typespeed.score

You can remove your old high score files if you are satisfied with the new precision.

0.4.0 - About the new way to calculate speed:

In versions before 0.4.0, the speed of words going across the screen was calculated exactly as in ztspeed (looked up from ztspeed's source code). It didn't work as we wanted it to (and probably was the cause of some odd bugs), so we changed it.

From version 0.4.0 the speed increases linearly. It makes the game a bit harder, because using the old way speed didn't increase almost at all in the beginning. But hopefully scores will now reflect player's actual typing speed more accurately. Scores will be about 10-25% smaller than with older versions (according to our tests). The CPS levels are not affected (why would they be?), but they might improve a little, because you won't be typing so long... <g>

Copyright

  Copyright (C) 1999-2004   Jani Ollikainen & Jaakko Manelius
  Copyright (C) 2006-2008   Tobias Stoeckmann

  Copying and distribution of this file, with or without modification,
  are permitted in any medium without royalty provided the copyright
  notice and this notice are preserved.

Reporting Bugs

Bugs/Ideas/Comments to tobias at openbsd dot org.

Cygwin is a registered trademark of Red Hat, Inc.
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