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TinySol, a tiny solitaire game for DOS

51 points by skibz ago | 14 comments

Sembiance |next [-]

inatreecrown2 |next |previous [-]

That gas-plasma display looks gorgeous, it looks more "analogue" than lcd to me. Are these still produced or is this "dead" technology?

omoikane |next |previous [-]

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)

bananaboy |next |previous [-]

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!

ctippett |next |previous [-]

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.

pan69 |next |previous [-]

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.

sys_64738 |next |previous [-]

This is real hacker news! Well done :)

febed |next |previous [-]

8086 and up! Amazing

petiepooo |next |previous [-]

Very nice. How about site where we can play it in the browser? There are several wasm dos simulators..

ranger_danger |next |previous [-]

Not open source apparently?

ranger_danger |next |previous [-]

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.

steve_taylor |root |parent |next [-]

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.

to11mtm |root |parent |previous [-]

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...

creado |previous [-]

Good work