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Comment by anticorporate | Hacker News Reader

I only ever knew the version of Tetris that shipped with the Windows Entertainment Pack <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Entertainment_Pack>.

Since this version was made for 16-bit Windows, it was no surprise that they used a 16-bit integer to store your score. What was surprising is that they used a signed 16-bit integer, meaning that after you passed 32,767 points, your score would roll over into the negative.

Teenage me was so good, I'd consider it a disappointment if my score didn't turn negative in every round I played.

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I played Minesweeper almost every day during the summer in the 90's. I got so good at it that I eventually whittled down my time to a mere 17 seconds on the largest puzzle (expert). At that point I figured I couldn't get any faster, and moved on to a new game. Years later, I was looking at the Guiness Book of World Records and noticed that the record for the expert minesweeper is something like 25 seconds.

Of course, I'd have to dig up my old computer from a landfill to try and prove it, so I just have to live out the rest of my days knowing that I'm an unrecognized world record holder.

xyzzy !

Funny story. When my friend started playing minesweeper, I would go to his computer and clear out all of his scores by editing in my scores as "beating" him.

Being super competitive, in order not to lose to me, he became a fiend at minesweeper, being able to do solve the beginner series in under 20 seconds. As he would get better and better, I would continue to beat his high score until he had the beginner down to somewhere around 7 seconds.

I changed it to 6 seconds.

He beat it to 5 seconds.

I changed it to 4 seconds.

At that point he was like, WHAT IS GOING ON? And then I showed him how I could just edit the scores. Boy was he dissapointed. But it goes to show how far we can push ourselves if we know that it's "possible."

Related: My mom really likes the old Windows version of FreeCell. For years, every time she moved computers, I've had to copy the Windows registry values where the score table is kept in order to get her to "accept" the new computer.

Nice one! I bet lots of world records are casually beat like that - the overlap between “nerdy enough to get insanely good at, say, a puzzle video game” and “extroverted/arrogant enough to draw global attention to the accomplishment” seems pretty small.

The current record [1] is in fact 26.59 seconds for expert. This doesn't make you an unofficial world record holder because, among other reasons, the chance is that you have encountered an easy enough board by chance. The most popular measure of board difficulty is 3BV, defined as the minimum number of left clicks to solve that particular board, and should be at least 100 for the expert record to be recognized. This makes the current record extremely impressive---someone somehow clicked 4+ times second and correctly solved the whole table!

[1] https://minesweepergame.com/world-records.php

It's the Tetris version I still like the best. I still play it from time to time. In a dedicated Windows XP virtual machine, since 64-bit Windows doesn't play nice with 16-bit programs.

Indeed, I consider it a disappointment when I don't succeed to turn the score negative. When I'm in the right state of mind, and have enough time, and a bit of luck maybe, I can go from positive to negative to positive back to negative multiple times; I've never kept count, but I know of some instances where I've played a single game for over 45 minutes at least.

You can run windows 3.1 in dosbox if all you want is Tetris. There's display drivers for large screens (or 24bit color, but not both) available for dosbox as well. A full virtual machine seems a bit overkill when my entire small doswin games directory is <200mb (this includes all WEPs and a few dozen other small games for win 3.x and dos). For better compatibility with the (extremely rare) program that doesn't work under dosbox's dos emulation, you can go further and run an actual copy of DOS on a disk image.

It's overkill, but it works :)

I might give the dosbox + windows 3.1 option a try though, thanks for the suggestion.

I recall that it was either old versions of Solitaire or Freecell that had the same issue. I remember intentionally losing games until my points were -32767ish, and it was the first time I experienced integer wraparound as a kid. That's the sort of thing that teaches you a lot unintentionally.

Anyway, I think that it's not really surprising that they'd use a signed integer in either case. In every codebase I've ever worked on, signed ints are the default merely because they're the obvious choice for a number. I only see uints when it actually matters, or when a developer is overly pedantic.

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