The solitaire game I wrote in 1983 and then... eventually it landed as online game on my website. Here's the history... copy-paste from there.
My wife's roommate taught us how to play this game in Spring 1977. We've spent a long time playing it in years that came, always having the trouble of cleaning up the table - it really needs lots of room if you play it with real cards.In 1983, I was waiting for my first machine to be delivered. It was a 16K Sinclair ZX Spectrum. I've found some books on its Basic, and started writing a program (on paper) to play this game. When the machine came, it took me two weeks to get it working. I can say I've learned Spectrum Basic while writing it.
In 1986 I started programming for a living, and quickly found out that machines at work are lacking substantial parts of entertainment software, so I rewrote this into CB-80 (Digital Research Basic for 8080 on CP/M) and PDP-11 Basic Plus 2. It looked somewhat ugly without graphics, but it worked.
In 1987 we've got the VAX, so I rewrote it to VAX Basic, and invented the scoring scheme and the top 20 table. Quickly I was beaten by operators, who played it absentmindedly while talking on the phone. I've also introduced the third redeal with, er, messages shown at the bottom. One of the messages read "a chamce for diletants" (the typo was deliberate), and my boss got it...
In 1988 I bought an Atari 1040 STf, and, what else, redid this in GFa Basic, happily reintroducing graphics. I've also tried to make a demo, but I did it by just letting it play at random. The result was disastrous: the demo took over the half top of the high score table. I've never tried that again, and this program should never have a demo mode which actually plays.
In 1989 I've definitively moved to PC's, and redid this in Quick Basic (v1.02, while it was Borland's). Had some color now, but it was still in character mode.
I've had this program forgotten for some time. In 1994 I've tried to redo it in QBasic, assuming it's capable of handling graphics, and took the Atari version as base, but to no avail. It worked, but looked ugly. So I've done it in Fox (both DOS and Windows, v2.6) but didn't play much with it. My kids still preferred the Atari version. At least, I've eradicated all the remaining GoTo's (most of them were moved to structured code as early as the Atari version).
In 1996 I've started testing it in Visual FoxPro, and porting the whole idea into OOP paradigm proved to be fun. By the end of 1997 I've moved it from VFP3.0 to 5.0, added some gadgets I've always missed (like the undo/redo buttons, yellow highlight on movable cards), and it was hard to finish because every version needed lots of testing (which actually means playing :).
Finally, in 1998 I've moved all the way from v9.08 to v9.16, adding font and color selection dialogue, full resizability, right-click menu, lack of bugs (hopefully), menu, painted the movable cards yellow, added a rightlcick menu for selecting the font and background color, and few invisible improvements. I even created a help file (most of this text is taken from it - there's no way I could compose such a nice piece of prose twice). Posted it on UA, and declared it shareware. The net profit was, as expected, zero - I didn't create a complete setup (a bit hard to upload four megs with the 33.6K connection I had at the time), just a VFP .exe file, which required the user to have the runtimes. Still, 478 people downloaded it (which is miserable - considering that some other things I posted there were downloaded about 2000 times). Besides, with Pretty Good Solitaire available, who would bother (I'm posting this link just to repay for using that game for about a year - my intention was to use the first income from VPasns to pay the guy, but I gave it up when I saw he said he needs to "feed his cats"; my kids come first and he gets a link).
Now it's year 2002, I'm not in Yugoslavia anymore... (actually, the country where this game was conceived doesn't exist anymore), but in the States, and my line of work made me learn JavaScript. What do I do when I learn a new programming language (albeit a scripting one)? Rewrite VPasns in it :).
Have fun.
Disclaimer: you waste your time, and I'll waste mine just like before.
Best regards, Gradivoj, available at sgrad@earthlink.net
1040, 1977, 3.0, 5.0, 8080, a demo, Atari, CB-80, Chamce for diletants, CP/M, eradicated, DOS, Fox, Gfa Basic, good morning, Goto, graphics, HTML, JavaScript, OOP, Quick Basic, PC, PDP, Spectrum, VAX, VFP, wheel, Whole idea, Windows, ZX are all some trademarks, owned by someone somewhere, so please remember I said so. Thank you.
12-VIII-2019 - 30-VI-2024