Been quiet here lately. Just wanted to say hi.

Hi! Seems like there's a bunch of us still visiting regularly, but without anything really to say we all just stay silent and/or look at the latest Retro Game of the Day image/video and then keep moving.

Yeah, pretty much what mossy said.

Honestly, I think that the world has moved on from what we all used to come here for.

It seems only recently that I took all my emulator projects out of retirement to do M1 updates. However, the download figures are only a fraction of what they used to be back in the day.

My Solitaire game might break even soon, though, which is something. Try it if you haven't:
apps.apple.com/ie/app/superior-solitaire/id1570982173?mt=12

One feature I'd love to see... make an option to only deal winnable games. Maybe it defeats the purpose to some... but my favorite OS 9 card game (cannto for the life of me remember the name) had this feature and it was wonderful.

menace690 wrote:

Eric's Ultimate Solitaire?

On a semi-related note, my book The Secret History of Mac Gaming is now back in print thanks to Bitmap Books and new copies are shipping from next week. We've done an "Expanded Edition" with some extra stories (Snood, Dungeon of Doom, Stick Man Games, a few other things), a really nice-looking timeline, a couple of icon galleries, loads more images, and some revisions to the layout. (I'll soon be self-publishing what I'm calling a digital add-on pack with just the new text, for anyone who has the first edition and doesn't want to fork out the cash to buy the Expanded Edition.)

www.bitmapbooks.co.uk/products/the-secre...ing-expanded-edition

Yes! Good call

menace690 wrote:


I've been thinking about this one – and am not at all sure how I'd go about computationally verifying that a certain deal was winnable in any half reasonable amount of time. Suggestions welcomed

This paper describes an algorithm to solve games, using heuristic search and state saving. So you could have your randomized deck, run through the solver, if its doesn't complete in X amount of time, you consider it unsolvable.

In their testing, they got over 60% win rate under a second of processing per deck, in 2007, so probably even higher rate of solving today.

web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~afern/papers/solitaire.pdf

Or a couple of solvers readily available that can potentially be adapted.

github.com/ShootMe/Klondike-Solver

github.com/shlomif/fc-solve

github.com/mchung94/pyramid-solver

Very interesting, thanks. I'll look into this.

In the meanwhile, I've reduced the price of my retro game bundles for Black Friday. Those who haven't tried yet, now's your chance to get ten games for just $4.99.

Bundle 1: apps.apple.com/ie/app-bundle/retro-game-bundle/id1521726386
Bundle 2: apps.apple.com/ie/app-bundle/retro-game-bundle-2/id1522892700
Bundle 3: apps.apple.com/ie/app-bundle/retro-game-bundle-3/id1545818336

Enjoy

I'm not sure anyone's still here, but just in case – Superior Solitaire 2.0 was released this morning, and one of the new features in this release is guaranteed winnable games.

www.superiorsolitaire.com/ for more details.

All the best.

Awesome! Already bought but thank you!

Just doing my annual check-in

Truth is, these days a lot of my emulation is via RetroArch, which is blandly cross-platform, and a lot of emulating I do on my phone, not on my Mac. And all the newer projects (Citra, Ryujinx, etc.) have their own GitHub pages and Discord channels.

But there's still lots of nostalgia wrapped up in this place