Stack Quizzer is a tool I designed to help me memorize a deck of cards. The concept is very simple: the program shows a card face or number, and you provide the missing element... easy! :-) There are a few additional features as well, such as limiting questions to a selected range (the feature I needed, as I like to memorize cards in small groups), following the "canonical" sequence or simulating a shuffled deck, showing the correct answer after a few seconds and so on. Although the most important stacks are provided right "out-of-the-box", the list can be easily expanded with the built-in deck editor.
The most important new in version 1.1 is the ability to speak out loud cards and card numbers in natural language! Thanks also to the auto-advance feature, this means you can now practice your favorite memorized deck even when away from the computer... isn't that cool? See the requirements below for more information on the speech feature.
Stack Quizzer is distributed under the GNU Public License and is available for free. The latest version of the program can always be downloaded from www.ascotti.org (look in the Magic section).
Please feel free to peek inside the main window or the deck editor window (with screenshots).
Stack Quizzer likes to run on Windows NT 4.0 or later, but I have done my best to make it work on Windows 95, 98 and ME. A problem I have found is that sometimes the deck editor displays only part of the graphics or no graphics at all: when that happens you'll probably have to exit from the program and restart it. (Technical note: the program uses a fairly complicated and officially undocumented way to interface with the 16-bit version of CARDS.DLL and since the problem is not critical I'm not particularly inclined to spend yet more time on that, sorry.)
Read this for the speech feature. Speeching is not supported on Windows 95 and should be automatically enabled on Windows 2000. On other systems, the required software components may or may not be already installed. Luckily, it's not difficult to find out. The program can be installed and started as usual, as speeching is disabled by default. To check if speech is working click on the Speech menu and then on the Enabled item. Now click on the Next button. If speech is working and you hear a voice talking your system then is already correctly configured, otherwise a window with an error message pops up (maybe a couple of them). Click Ok to close the window and immediately select the Speech menu again and the Disabled item to avoid further errors.
What to do if speech does not work. It might be necessary to install the Microsoft Speech API 4.0 pack (827K, here is the local mirror) followed by the Microsoft Text-To-Speech Engine 4.0 (7.31MB). Please note that installation order is important: the Speech pack must be installed first, followed by the Speech engine. Installing the above in the correct order has solved the problem on my Windows 98 test machine. For Windows XP you may want to visit the Help for your Speech Application page from the Microsoft Speech site, which also contains a smaller version of the Text-To-Speech engine.
Here the result of several tests performed on different systems:
| System | Basic features (no speech) | Speech |
| Windows 95 | Not tested (should work) | Not supported |
| Windows 98 | Ok | Requires additional components |
| Windows ME | Not tested (should work) | Not tested |
| Windows NT 4.0 | Ok | Not tested |
| Windows 2000 | Ok | Ok |
| Windows XP | Ok | Not tested |
Please note that the program works and is useful even without speeching, although that's definitely nice to have.
Click on a link below to download:
The standalone installer has been created with Inno Setup, a wonderful free installer for Windows by Jordan Russel.
Copyright (c) 2003 Alessandro Scotti
| Main features: Quizzer | Deck Editor |
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