Euchre Alpha Released

[Nostalgic]

I found out that the profile entry I created for the Stella emulator had the wrong MD5 values for both the NTSC and PAL versions. This should not affect gameplay, but it may cause the PAL version to not be recognized as PAL.

 

You can get the corrected one here: http://www.wwnet.net/~eeid/station26/Euchre.pro

[Cap5750]

I didn't graduate from Ohio State, but I'm a Buckeye true-and-true! Currently live about 10 minutes from The Shoe!

 

Cap

[Big Player]

It's entirely possible the computer was going alone. That could be why I lost so many games to that dumb guy. Boy, I'm sure making Ohio State proud. (They may take the Cum Laude off my degree as well. )

 

I'm using version 1.54 of Z26 in Windows 98. It's the NTSC rom. The screenshots are in PCX format, so I can't attach them yet. But looking at them, it looks to me like the computer was going alone.

 

Beer + Euchre = good

 

Beer + play testing = bad

[Nostalgic]

It's entirely possible the computer was going alone.

 

Whew! That's a relief. I played a few games last night and didn't see any evidence of tricks with missing cards except when a player went alone. All the same, I'll still keep an eye open for a little while.

 

Anyhow, take heart! Since I was searching for a potential bug, I played a few games, and came across something else. If you are the dealer, your partner orders up the turned-up card, and your partner chooses to go alone, the game still makes you discard. This doesn't affect game play, but it's unnecessary to force the discard, since you won't play anyway.

 

(My partner had two loners in the same game. I think the last time I managed that was maybe eight years ago. *sigh*)

 

Sometimes you only find bugs by searching for unrelated bugs, so thanks for the help!

 

BTW, Big Player, is the man in your avatar Ken Uston, the gambling and video gaming veteran of the early 1980s that wrote "Mastering Pac-Man"?

[CrazyImpmon]

I think I found another bug, possibly a missing delay cycle. When you pass the first round, The arrow points down (you) with the letter P for about half a sec before turning to the next player. But in the second round, there's no delay at all, the arrow points to the player to the left right away.

 

Just thought I'd point that out as it would improve the consistencity of the game if that was fixed.

 

Also earlier in this thread you said you had to squish the suit symbols to 6 bytes rather than the 8 bytes, yet you also mentioned there's about 50 bytes left. Why not change the suit to a full 8 byte each so we'd get a better looking club and a diamond that doesn't look like an oval?

[Big Player]

 

Sometimes you only find bugs by searching for unrelated bugs, so thanks for the help!

 

No problem. The game is very addicting. I'll keep playing it and let you know if I find anything else.

 

 

BTW, Big Player, is the man in your avatar Ken Uston, the gambling and video gaming veteran of the early 1980s that wrote "Mastering Pac-Man"?

 

Yes, it's the cover of his first book, The Big Player: How a Team of Blackjack Players Made a Million Dollars. I'm a huge fan of the late gaming genius.

[rolenta]

Yes, it's the cover of his first book, The Big Player: How a Team of Blackjack Players Made a Million Dollars. I'm a huge fan of the late gaming genius.

 

I met Ken Uston one year at CES when he was showing off Puzzlemania. A photographer for Infoweek magazine took a photo of him displaying the game as e and several other people watched. I don't know if the photo was ever published.

[Nostalgic]

I think I found another bug, possibly a missing delay cycle.  When you pass the first round, The arrow points down (you) with the letter P for about half a sec before turning to the next player.  But in the second round, there's no delay at all, the arrow points to the player to the left right away.

 

I noticed the same thing earlier today while I was working on fixing the unnecessary discard bug I mentioned in a previous post. Thanks for spotting it! I'm glad to see there are sharp eyes out there.

 

Also earlier in this thread you said you had to squish the suit symbols to 6 bytes rather than the 8 bytes, yet you also mentioned there's about 50 bytes left.  Why not change the suit to a full 8 byte each so we'd get a better looking club and a diamond that doesn't look like an oval?  

 

Keeping every symbol six lines high helps compact the code. I have one routine with multiple entry points that calculates the address of an image of any type (except a letter) on the fly. I'd have to make a separate routine to have some symbols be six lines high and others be eight, or else I'd have to add two lines to every image. Since there are 43 images, this would be 86 more bytes just to expand all the images to eight lines. (This also means going to seven lines would cost 43 bytes, and even with 50 bytes left, I'd have to add code to calculate offsets based on multiples of seven instead of six.)

 

If nothing else, the suits look better than the ones in Casino.