Re: [stella] Card Games - UNO

["Erik J. Eid" <eeid@xxxxxxxxx>]

At 10:50 PM 11/23/01 -0600, Paul Slocum wrote:
> > I [Glenn Saunders] have been thinking about doing UNO but I haven't 
> > really thought about the feasibility of it yet.
> >
> > I used to LOVE Uno.
> >
> > Since there are 108 cards in an UNO deck, RAM would be very tight if it 
> > were going to be on a regular 4K ROM.
> Wow, that's a great idea.  UNO would be fun.  I bet you could just use a 
> single bit to keep track of which cards have been dealt from the 
> deck.  Then it would only take 14 bytes.

One challenge I can see is that a person's hand can theoretically grow 
almost as large as the deck.  (Imagine being on the receiving end of a 
series of Draw Two and Draw Four cards, with enough Reverse and Skip cards 
thrown in to ensure you never get a turn.)  Without a fixed limit, you'd 
have to set aside enough RAM for each hand to hold 108 cards, or devise a 
structure which is constantly reorganized so that one hand immediately 
follows another in memory.

The same challenge would spill into the screen display.  You'll have to 
allow for the human player's hand to be limitless, scrolling through its 
contents when it is larger than the screen.

How do you make sure the player says "Uno" when he or she is down to one 
card?  :)

If there ends up being a concern about copyright infringement, you could 
dig up a variant of Crazy Eights, which is a similar game that uses a 
standard deck of cards.  (Then again, we do have Video Simon and Yahtzee, 
so perhaps it isn't a concern.)

I do agree that it will probably need to be a Supercharger game due to the 
RAM required.  Even with a small deck (24 cards), my Euchre game uses 
locations $80-$D3, or 84 bytes of RAM, though I'd bet that could be reduced 
with more efficient code.  (However, only 24 bytes of that is for the deck 
itself, as the deck occupies the same memory as the four players' hands and 
the current trick.)

I think a 2600 Uno is a fabulous idea!  I'm eager to see more...


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