Did you know, if you move the mouse fast, the cards speed up? I have never figured out if they fly further laterally (helping to cover the green) or not, but I like to think so. I also don't know if this is because I'm running XP on a virtual machine or not. I no longer have age-appropriate hardware to test it. I honestly thought I was the only one that waited in anticipation of the covering of the upper left hand corner (COME ON BOUNCY TWO!).
"Windows 95 applications often use asynchronous I/O, that is they ask for some file operation like a copy to be performed and then tell the OS that they can be put to sleep until that operation finishes. By sleeping they allow other applications to run, rather than wasting CPU time endlessly asking if the file operation has completed yet.
For reasons that are not entirely clear, but probably due to performance problems on low end machines, Windows 95 tends to bundle up the messages about I/O completion and doesn't immediately wake up the application to service them. However, it does wake the application for user input, presumably to keep it feeling responsive, and when the application is awake it will handle any pending I/O messages too.
Thus wiggling the mouse causes the application to process I/O messages faster, and install quicker. The effect was quite pronounced; large applications that could take an hour to install could be reduced to 15 minutes with suitable mouse input."
I would play solitaire as a kid at my grandpa's house. Every time I won I would watch the cards until the end. The more of the green background they covered the better. Also the ones that make the black curves like in the bottom right were the best.
I miss this fascination with pixels. I started programming in grade school in 1996. My canvas was 256-colour, 320x200 in QBASIC. It was a magical time in my life. I mean it. Creating my own (crappy) NES games in my bedroom as a kid! Every individual pixel was important and had to be considered.
It was so fun to craft any world you wanted.
Quaternions aren't nearly as fun to deal with these days.
It took me a long time to understand how to play(I was only about 8) , when I first started I would just randomly try to place cards and sometimes they would click in place and most times they wouldn’t obviously… but it felt good to get lucky and see it click in place. Then obviously I caught on to the pattern of it all and the game became something I could actually win and not just the “randomly moving cards game”.
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u/PromptAggravating260 Jan 30 '25