Cost of this program is $10.00 but it is fully functional shareware. Send payment via Paypal.com for $10.00 to the e-mail address: Alex@gunstar1.com. This program is dedicated to my grand daughters, Jamie, Alex and Sarah. It is copyrighted by Science Specialists, Inc. and a donation would be appreciated. Any money made on this program will go toward their college education. This program allows you to generate, play and print, potentially billions of sudoku games. It was based on an earlier mapping program and is A cheat option is available which can speed the game as well as a printing option by clicking in the lower right corner of the puzzle form. In addition you can substitute Kanji characters for the numbers if you feel that this simple game, dreamed up by a fellow Hoosier needs an even more oriental look and feel. I did not choose to overwrite the English for the commands but this could also be done in a future version. The Kanji font was obtained from an open source project for labelling Mah Jong tiles. Below is a description of the mapping mode built into this program, the source of much of the structure. The now defunct Micrographx Picture Publisher was used to generate the base screen graphics. Colors were picked after viewing Japanese temple pictures from my niece and her friends in Japan.

Occasionally one must rid oneself of an obsession, in this case Sudoku. The original program was fairly unsophisticated and raw but it could solve many sudoku puzzles within a guess or two. For the most part that base program was preserved, a simple mapping program to allow you to quickly eliminate obvious puzzle choices based on whether the number selected appears in any of the cross bars or within the 3x3 being considered. The program is written in Visual Basic6 and the source code is provided.

You can also enter your own puzzle and thereby allow you to use the mapper to solve any puzzle you may have found in the newspaper or outside source:

1. Type in your puzzle as a text file using the create option found in the menu, any ascii text editor such as notepad can also be used. Seperate all the numbers in each row of 9 numbers by commas, zeroes represent the spaces.
2. Next Solve the puzzle as you would normally
3. Finally save the puzzle, both the answers and the puzzle will be saved so that you can load it and play it at a later time. You may have to reset the puzzle and make an alternate set of guesses to solve the puzzle.

There you have it. Its out of my system sort of. I could add an autoguess option or extend the map to drop out two number and three number homogenous patches, like where 3 and 7 could go into one of two spots but nowhere else. And you could add a feature that would look for three numbers in a row in a 3x3 such that those force the presence of numbers to other rows or columns in the puzzle. ad infinitum.... OK, its not out of my system, but now at least it is a more or less functional program, so enjoy.