Re: [stella] Poker Solitaire

["B. Watson" <urchlay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 22 Nov 2001, Erik J. Eid wrote:

>
> In my first game I came so close!  I had the jack, queen, ace, and ten of
> hearts.  The king never showed up.  :(
>

Do you think the royal flush should be worth more than a regular straight
flush? The standard scoring system counts them the same (30)..

Look at this (practically impossible to get) hand:

10h  Jh  Qh  Kh  Ah
10c  Jc  Qc  Kc  Ac
10s  Js  Qs  Ks  As
10d  Jd  Qd  Kd  Ad
2h   3h  4h  5h  6h

If a royal flush and a straight flush are both 30 points, and 4 of a kind
is 16... that's (5*30)+(5*16) = 230 points. If a royal flush is 36 points, it's
254 points, which still fits in one byte...

Can you think of a higher-scoring hand? I think it's not possible... so I
could give the bonus for royal vs. straight flush.. but should I be messing
with the rules that way?

> >Joystick movement is a little wonky (try it)
>
> My problem wasn't so much with the joystick (I was playing on Z26), but
> with the trigger.  It seemed that it would take a couple of tries to place
> a card on some occasions.
>

The whole joystick routine is going to be re-written pretty soon. I was up
until 4am last night finishing up the scoring, so the game is now fully
functional at least.

>
> I'm impressed!  Despite needing the left side for the calculations, you did
> something that I dreaded trying with Euchre.  That's why Euchre has the
> vertical orientation.  I had a hard enough time getting the West and East
> players' cards on the same horizontal lines.  Two cards was enough!
>

Wish I could remember how to play Euchre.. many years ago I learned it &
played it some, but all I remember about it now was that the card ranks
were non-standard (jacks are high?)

>
> I agree that this is pretty darn cool.  Not only is it nice to look at, but
> you've got a built-in attract mode!  After a game ends, you could wait
> about 15-30 seconds, then start the shuffling while maintaining the
> previous score.
>

Good idea. Do you think I should add sound to the shuffling too? I was
planning on at least making some bloops & bleeps when moving & placing
cards, kind of like the Chess cartridge does.

>
> It doesn't suck.  :)
>
> I'm not sure that I like the sickly-yellow card color, but that might
> simply be how Z26 is displaying the cards.  Regarding playing only on the
> right side of the screen, wasn't some 2600 Tetris clone primarily on one
> side?  There are other games that use only a portion of the screen, such as
> Dodge 'Em (mostly the lower part), 3-D Tic Tac Toe (the center), and Qb
> (while there is a target grid showing, the action is in the left and center).
>

No, the sickly-yellow card color is $FF, which is the random number I chose
when I couldn't decide what color to make the cards :)

They should probably be $0c or $0e, bright white. Also I'm thinking of color
coding the score at the end of the game (maybe red for <25, yellow for 25-40,
green for >40).

Manuel has given me a pretty good idea of how to center the display, which
I haven't tried yet...

> Looking forward to more...

The .bin attached to this message actually shows you your score at the end
of the game... so far I haven't found any bugs in the scoring, but there
might be some.

Adios,
B.

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