Orkut:TypeRacer Bot

The typeracer application is an interesting idea presented in a splendid manner. It encourages, typing practice as it involves competition. The first time I clocked a speed of 47wpm. Not very bad, as it put me second among my friends. The first person had a speed of 56wpm. A peep into the recent high scores gave me a shock. Speeds of only 140+wpm were being featured. (By the way, wpm means words per minute). Typing out three words per minute isn’t an easy deal. Only then can speeds of 180 be reached. I moved back to my gang of friends and their speeds.

Later I got busy with other stuffs, and came back to TypeRacing when the problem of script tag not being filtered came into picture. (Read about this here)

But when one of my friends clocked 186 wpm in a single race, I had my own reasons to doubt this application’s working. A quick google search, took me to Orkut Plus. This post brought into light the real picture. TypeRacer Application Hack.

The hack helped reach speeds of 60-70 wpm. But how come ridiculous speeds of 180+?

Wind Racing

For this I needed to know how the software worked. It was known as the TypeRacer Crack then. Thanks to Vipul, it shall be referred to as the TypeRacer Bot in this post. Let’s briefly see how it works.

This bot, automatically types the text to be typed wherever the focus is there. It is made using Visual Basic. With the help of Vivek, I obtained the source code of this bot.

Dim i As Integer
Dim textnew As String
Private Sub Command1_Click()
Timer2.Enabled = True
End Sub

Private Sub Command2_Click()
Text1.Text = Clipboard.GetText
End Sub

Private Sub Timer1_Timer()
i = i + 1
textnew = Text1.Text
SendKeys (Mid(textnew, i, 1))
If i > Len(textnew) Then
Timer1.Enabled = False
Timer2.Enabled = False
i = 0
Text1.Text = “”
End If
End Sub

Private Sub Timer2_Timer()
Timer1.Enabled = True
End Sub

This code uses two timers, two command buttons and the speed and delay time cannot be controlled. So I revised this code, to make a customizable typeracer bot. In this AutoTyper (my own fancy name for the Customizable TypeRacer Bot!), we can decide on how fast the text to be typed and when the bot should start typing. The delay time is used to avoid, type errors.

The important point to be emphasized is the use of SendKeys() function in the bot. This function does the trick. Here is the revised code (Note: This is not the source code for AutoTyper, it is a non-customizable version’s code).

Dim i As Integer
Dim tInput As String

Private Sub cmdAuto_Click()
tmrTyper.Enabled = True
End Sub

Private Sub cmdExit_Click()
End
End Sub

Private Sub cmdStop_Click()
tmrTyper.Enabled = False
txtInput.Text = “”
tInput = “”
End Sub

Private Sub tmrTyper_Timer()
tmrTyper.Interval = 50
i = i + 1
SendKeys (Mid(tInput, i, 1))
If i > Len(tInput) Then
tmrTyper.Enabled = False
i = 0
txtInput.Text = “”
tmrTyper.Interval = 5000
End If
End Sub

Private Sub txtInput_Change()
tInput = txtInput.Text
End Sub

It uses a single Timer, and a single Command button for auto-typing. The Stop Typing Button, is used to stop the bot’s action when, it doesn’t work as expected to work, causing type errors. The default frequency has been set at 50 and the delay as 5 sec. A frequency below 50 might result in ridiculous and mind blowing speeds, and might also disqualify you from the race. And a very small delay time, could cause type errors as shown. Here frequency means how fast the software types. Lower the frequency higher the speed.

During testing, I found one racer actually trying to over take my bot! It was obvious that, another bot was doing it’s job there. Now it was not the race among the users, it was a race among the bots! Well my bot won that race. . And there were many people, who approached me asking how I clocked these speeds. To all of them, I am using AutoTyper since the 16th of May, 2008, only for testing.

Thanks to Vivek, Aashish, Gaurav, Kunal Pradhan and Vipul for directly and indirectly contributing to this post, Thank You.

You can Download AutoTyper from here.

1Y0-259 is the most advanced certification possible after 70-536 or 70-642 and hence is considered more important than any certification of 642-642 series, even 642-825.