Hey very nice! I made a 386+VGA Solitaire game a while back for a game jam https://horsedrawngames.itch.io/solitaire I always meant to go back and optimise it more because it shouldn’t require a Pentium!
Late (late.sh) has solitaire available to play over SSH (along with minesweeper, tetris, battleships, chess... and many more). You'd be surprised at how well a lot of games translate just fine to being rendered on a simple interface.
I like to think I'm decent with C, and I thought I would be able to make my own solitaire, but just trying to wrap my head around how in the world I was supposed to lay out all the cards in memory and keep track of all the different states had me giving up pretty quickly.
I'd start by identifying all the known boundaries:
52 cards, so each card can be represented by a byte.
Cards are arranged into 4 stacks of up to 13 cards each, 7 columns of up to 13 cards each, and a pile of up to 24 remaining cards. (You don't need two piles of remaining cards.)
That's 167 (4 * 13 + 7 * 13 + 24) bytes for the cards, 12 bytes to store lengths, and 1 byte to store the current index in the pile of remaining cards. It's a fixed number of fixed-length byte arrays and a fixed number of bytes to track lengths and one index.
I feel like Klondike, -should- be simple enough with a set of vectors/arrays/lists, the biggest thing is making sure you have the traversal logic right. [0]
Related, play Solitaire over gopher https://cosmicrealms.com/blog/2019/06/14/solitaire-over-goph...
Related, Oscar Toledo also made a tiny Klondike Solitaire program for IOCCC, I wonder if it was inspired by this one:
https://nanochess.org/klondike_in_c.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48450024 - Klondike Solitaire game for curses in 5k of C (2026-06-08, 17 comments)
Hey very nice! I made a 386+VGA Solitaire game a while back for a game jam https://horsedrawngames.itch.io/solitaire I always meant to go back and optimise it more because it shouldn’t require a Pentium!
That gas-plasma display looks gorgeous, it looks more "analogue" than lcd to me. Are these still produced or is this "dead" technology?
Late (late.sh) has solitaire available to play over SSH (along with minesweeper, tetris, battleships, chess... and many more). You'd be surprised at how well a lot of games translate just fine to being rendered on a simple interface.
Solitiny :)
> NOTE: For DosBox users, DosBox doesn’t seem to support AT&T 6300 but the other modes work fine.
I'm pretty sure DOSBox supports the Olivetti M24 graphics mode.
This is real hacker news! Well done :)
8086 and up! Amazing
Very nice. How about site where we can play it in the browser? There are several wasm dos simulators..
Not open source apparently?
I like to think I'm decent with C, and I thought I would be able to make my own solitaire, but just trying to wrap my head around how in the world I was supposed to lay out all the cards in memory and keep track of all the different states had me giving up pretty quickly.
I'd start by identifying all the known boundaries:
52 cards, so each card can be represented by a byte.
Cards are arranged into 4 stacks of up to 13 cards each, 7 columns of up to 13 cards each, and a pile of up to 24 remaining cards. (You don't need two piles of remaining cards.)
That's 167 (4 * 13 + 7 * 13 + 24) bytes for the cards, 12 bytes to store lengths, and 1 byte to store the current index in the pile of remaining cards. It's a fixed number of fixed-length byte arrays and a fixed number of bytes to track lengths and one index.
Probably depends on the kind of solitaire IMO.
I feel like Klondike, -should- be simple enough with a set of vectors/arrays/lists, the biggest thing is making sure you have the traversal logic right. [0]
[0] - I mean, here's an example in VB.NET, where a lot of the game logic is FBOW integrated into the form logic, but hey it apparently is NET8! https://github.com/DualBrain/Solitaire/blob/master/Solitaire...
Good work