SOLITAIRE!!

If you enjoy something, then doing it on the computer is better, right? Well, possibly.  I suspect the genesis of this program was my Mum, who, possibly just humouring me, suggested she might like to play patience on the computer.  Sold!

Based on the line number for the BASIC "SYS" command that starts the program, I wrote this in 1987.   That seems late, but I know there were several iterations.

I think the (what we now call) user-interface started of differently and was likely using the cursor-keys to move between the stacks with return selecting the action.  Thumbs down from Mum: She felt that all the key-presses took her out of the moment.  The feel of the physical card-game was lost.  Fair enough.

So I ended up with the simple action menu.  Mum approved!  Aside from the name that is:  I called it Solitaire not Patience.  Almost certainly due to (unintentional) peer-pressure from James.

I remember distinctly a discussion James and I had about how the standard 3-card-draw works and what it does to the order of the deck.  He got it immediately.  It took me a bit longer and likely required lots of diagrams and aspirin.  Worthwhile though.  Of course, once that code was written and verified, I forgot all of it.

This version of solitaire (or patience or klondike) has a couple of quirks - and by quirks I mean the way I was taught to play as a young boy.  There's no way to move just part of a pile to a different, presumably more advantageous pile: once a card is laid then it stays put until moved to a suit-stack.  Also once a card has been moved to a suit-stack it can't be moved to one of the piles.  I don't think I'd even considered these two moves until a few years later when Microsoft released their solitaire game for Windows.

And then there's the tune.  Any self-respecting game has a tune.  I asked James to write me a tune, and he did not disappoint.  I converted the 3-voices of note-octave-duration triplets he gave me into nybbles and wrote an interrupt routine that would feed them into the SID with the correct timing.  I also coded a way to just play the last bar-or-two as a reward for completing the game.  Sorted.

(James forgot about that tune and has since described it as "Amazing! Sounds like discount Mozart.")

The program worked, looked good, was Mum approved and had a cracker of a tune.  Great.  And I did nothing with it.  For ages.

At some point I uploaded it somewhere.  My brain says it was to Q-Link, though it may have been CompuServe.  Something tells me I didn't upload it until DesTerm 1.02 had made a bit of an impact.  The lack of fanfare with which I uploaded it translated directly to it being entirely ignored...

... mostly...

While I wasn't looking it seems to have been included on a LOADSTAR disk in 1995.  I don't recall being canvassed about its inclusion.  I guess unattributed public-domain software was fair-game for commercial enterprises.

While searching for details of which LOADSTAR disk it was on (I failed) I discovered that there is at least one cracked version (why?) and you can even play it online: https://c64online.com/c64-games/solitaire-5/

So I suppose that's cool.