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The leaflet with Hidden Letters describes it as an educational game to improve spelling and comprehension, and gives full details.

Loading is quite quick, giving more instructions and a choice of nine difficulty levels. You can choose a text provided in the program, or enter up to twelve lines of your own. This requires some care, as the cursor keys do not work, so you must delete back to any errors made, and re-type.

The chosen type is then displayed on the screen, with some letters obscured by black squares - nearly all of them at difficulty level nine. A blue square is then moved with the cursors to cover a blanked letter and its identity guessed by pressing the appropriate key.

If correct the letter appears, with some coloured stars at the bottom of the screen as a score. Wrong guesses produce a polite bleep, and the zero key the correct answer but no score. When complete, the total score and an invitation to repeat appear.

This is quite an ingenious program, well thought out and presented, though I would have liked to see more use of colour to brighten up the mostly black on white displays. I doubt it will do much for spelling skills.

H.W.C.