Playing Arcade Mahjong at Home? Or is it just a Mirage? | Hacker News Reader

Playing Arcade Mahjong at Home? Or is it just a Mirage?

nicole.express

Despite the author (quite correctly) saying that explanations of riichi mahjong tend to sound like Calvinball, I highly recommend people learn the game if you have some time. There are some good videos on youtube going through it (they are long!), but once you learn how to play it's a ton of fun. A good mix of luck and strategy, and tiles are fun to play with (if you're playing in person).

Agreed! I've been playing both offline and in the web client Jantama / Mahjong Soul. Not too far from getting into the gold room.

One of my New Year's resolutions for this year is that I try and go playing in a mahjong parlor for the first time in my life. Still trying to get a bit better before going there.

The big thing that holds me off from playing in person is scoring; for the life of me I really struggle with the fu calculation.

I guess the solution to that is only win big hands, but that's its own problem :)

It helps if you think that there are only three kinds of hands:

- 25 fu hand (chiitoitsu) 16 / 32 / 64

- 30 fu hands: 10 / 20 / 39 / 58

- 40 fu hands (especially toitoi, but also some others with koutsu's) 13 / 26 / 52

As long as you don't have any kans (and you mostly shouldn't call those), the others are a rounding error.

The hardest part of IRL play for me has been actually getting 4 people who know how to play the game in a single room lol

I rather enjoy Mahjong - the actual game, played in person even - and so it's a continuing mild disappointment that so often when a thing says "Mahjong" it's actually just tile matching, or a porn game, or in some cases both.

I played a decent video game rendition of the actual Mayjong - not tile matching, nobody gets their tits out, it matters whether you're actually any good at it - in the 1980s but I had no idea this wasn't a common thing, so I don't even remember the name of the software.

I’ll guess the computer at the bottom is an NEC PC-98/9801.

What is this supergun the author keeps talking about?

"Supergun" is a term for an adapter intended to allow JAMMA-compatible arcade boards to be used with standard home video equipment. Normally, you'd need an arcade cabinet with a JAMMA port, compatible arcade-RGB display, and all the wiring harnesses behind it, but that is a space hog and most people don't want one in their house.

If the sibling comment isn't enough detail, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperGun

Fair enough, I guess I'm assuming too much knowledge-- a supergun is just a device designed to take a JAMMA arcade connector and provide everything an arcade cabinet would do for a home setup. (i.e., provide video output, some sort of game controller input, bring audio levels down from amplified JAMMA to line level)

I've talked about playing arcade boards at home on the blog so often I sometimes forget to be more accommodating to new readers.

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