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[Prizm] Freecell

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Posts: 69
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 4:29 am
Calculators: Casio Cfx Series, Casio fx-CG10

[Prizm] Freecell

Postby nsg » Sun Mar 10, 2013 1:30 am

I have posted the Basic implementation of Freecell in the download section
http://www.casiopeia.net/forum/downloads.php?view=detail&df_id=98

Freecell is my favorite solitaire card game. It used to be one of the standard Windows games (since Windows '95), but no more.

I wanted to make the game in Basic. Since graphic on Prizm Basic is so slow, graphic mode was out of the question. That left me with the 7x21 text screen. The problem is that Freecel has to display 52 cards in 8 stacks + 4 temporary slots + 4 goal piles + some labels and UI visual cues -- all at once.
This is forth or fifth iteration of the layout. I used regular letters and digits as card ranks at first, but that made the piles display too crowded and hard to tell where the one card ends and another begins. The need to insert space between the columns ate up a lot of screen. Serendipitously, the subscripted letters are left aligned inside their character cells, so that extra space visually separated card columns from each other. As additonal bonus they are more of same size as [10] character than full size letters. The temporary slots used to be in the top row, just like in the original Windows program, but because of saved horizontal separators, I could place them along the side. and make columns 1 card taller. I also realized that destination piles do not need individual labels, one label for all of them is enough.
Prizm's colors helped a lot to make sense of the display. They also allow to save screenspace -- having a label and a display element different color eliminates the need of separator between them.

Image

EDIT: updated with version 1.0. This one allows to scroll tall piles to see what cards are there.

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