SpellRight is a spelling program aimed at children at age 6 and above. The program consists of three parts: Spelling game, Hangman game, and Crossword game.
In the spelling game the child is supposed to spell a word that is illustrated with a picture and possibly a sound. There are three levels of difficulty and the registered program contains approximately 250 words with pictures and sound (in the unregistered program only 30 words are being used).
In the hangman game the child should try to guess a hidden word, letter by letter. After 13 unsuccessful attempts "you are hanged" and the word is shown. The words are the same as in the spelling game.
In the crossword game the child should solve a crossword. The registered program contains 20 crosswords (in the unregistered program only 3 crosswords are available).
In all games the child can choose between small and large letters. In the spelling game the program can be put in demo-mode in which the spelling is shown.
In the registered program you may use external word files, change or add new words, add new crosswords, modify existing crosswords, replace the sound effects, as well as change the colors of some parts of the program.
SpellRight is installed by simply copying the entire SpellRight folder to your hard disk. If you have downloaded SpellRight from Internet the folder is probably compressed and coded (in .sit.hqx or .sit.bin format) and you have to unstuff and decode it first. Stuffit Expander (freeware) can do that for you.
N.B: You cannot run SpellRight from write protected (locked) units like CD-ROMs. (That's because SpellRight is writing to it's own resource fork.)
If you want to be able to use the SpellRight Guide, it has to be placed in the same folder as the SpellRight application.
SpellRight requires a 68040 processor (Color Quickdraw) or better, MacOS 7.0 or later, Sound Manager 3.0 or later, as well as a color screen capable of 640 x 480 resolution or better. SpellRight needs approximately 1.5 MB of RAM but can survive on less if a small screen resolution (480 x 640) and few colors (256) are being used. If you want to use more than thousands of colors, the program may require more RAM.
In order to minimize the size of the program, I have only used pictures of icon-size (32 x 32 pixels) that are enlarged to 64x64 pixel size. This means that some pictures may look a bit granular, especially with low screen resolution.
The word-sounds have all been recorded with my Performa's built in microphone (thanks Erik) and then compressed with MACE 3:1. Despite the compression, the average sound is approxiamtelt 5 kB. With 250 words that becomes 1.25 MB which without compression would have been trippled!
N.B: After registering the program you may easily replace both pictures and sounds yourself.
SpellRight is a shareware program. You may use it for 30 days without paying. If you wish to continue using it after this trial period, you have to pay. The single user licence is $15. In the registered program you also get access to all the built in words and crosswords, as well as all the modification possibilities built into the program.
Read in the accompanying documentation about how to register.
Thanks goes first of all to my son Erik who was kind enough to read all the words for sound recording, and who helped me beta test the program. Thanks also to my daughter Nina who's spelling attempts made me start thinking about this program (a looooong time ago). Thanks to my wife Karin who allowed all late nights and weekends in front of my Mac when I tried to learn to master the Mac toolbox.
Thanks to all the kind people who put sound and pictures on the Internet for free downloading and usage. Most of the pictures comes from the iconolog
I do not guarantee anything and do not take any responsibility for possible problems caused by this software. SpellRight is distributed as is and is used at your own risk.
I do not allow that SpellRight is distributed with additional costs added. I do allow SpellRight to be included on CD-collections and similar as long as the entire distribution is supplied: SpellRight application, SpellRight Guide, ReadMe file, Document. I and II
