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Comment by Thiz | Hacker News Reader

When windows 95 came out, I got hooked on solitaire. I played for hours till I could finish it under 100 seconds, then to 90s, 80s, 70, and 60s. It was really hard to finish it below 50 seconds but once I got to 49s then that was my mark. Hard to do but got some games done under 50 seconds and then suddenly I got a lucky shot with all cards in an easy setting which I finished in 37 seconds. My own world record.

I considered myself the fastest mouse mover of all universe.

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A decade or so ago, a friend of mine and I were living out of hotel rooms in Italy whilst we were waiting to rent a flat and find jobs. We were running low on funds and were struggling to find ways to entertain ourselves (and it was January and the weather was terrible - six inches or more of snow on the ground for several weeks). With nothing much else to do, and no wifi in the hotels, we took to a supremely healthy life of smoking Camels, drinking cheap beer, and playing Marble Blast Gold in our hotel room on my G4 iBook.

We finished the game pretty quickly and then became hopelessly obsessed with shaving fractions of seconds off our best times on the easier levels; we were both supremely competitive people (and averagely well coordinated, I guess) and this went on for two or maybe three weeks until we found somewhere to live, got Internet access, and had some meaningful form of employment. We hardly played it after that.

A few years later, I looked online and found some sites with high-scores; ours were, on certain levels (the ones we'd really cared about), by so far the best in the world it was pretty funny.

The level with just a vertical drop down a pipe to land on the target below, filled with random obstacles to bounce you off a perfectly straight run. Three of us were competing on that with ultra-close scores... I wish I still had our scores.

We played that one hundreds of times, experimenting with the straight roll off the edge, roll-jumping, a quick brake before slipping over the edge, everything we could think of to shave off that last little bit.

Thanks for reminding me. :)

I remember that one! Our favourite was the level with the hoops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37CsfIix2LA Let's just say the time they get on YouTube there wouldn't really hold a candle to what we achieved after several consolidated days of effort!

You will definitely have a bit of fun with this, then:

http://mrdoob.com/lab/javascript/effects/solitaire/

Drag the mouse for great victory.

Passed this around my family. Everyone who remembered the game got great joy from it. Then my autistic four year old insisted "MORE CARDS! MORE CARDS! BOOOOOOM!"

You, sir, have made my day.

Awesome!

Supports multi-touch as well.

batmansbelt, it seems you are hellbanned, that means nobody can see your posts unless they are logged in and have "showdead" turned on.

In the dying days of paging, I worked at a retail place that sold pagers and when business was slow (which was most of the day at that point) we'd have freecell challenges of how many games you could win consecutively. As soon as you lost, someone else got a shot.

I was champion briefly when I had around 40 games in a row. Then my co-worker blew me away at 64 for about a week. Nobody ever got beyond 100, the closet before I quit was a high schooler who was on a 73 game tear.

Those pale in comparison to some of the world records I think are in the 10,000 games and up level.

I think you may enjoy this: http://solitaire-ranking.org/rankings/sol_std_95

If you had a video of your attempt, or at least a screenshot of the ending screen, you would be either the #3 (if it was 3-draw) or the #7 (1-draw) Windows 95 Solitaire player in the world.

I remember I printscreened that particular game, but it was almost twenty years ago and no, I guess that computer is in some dumpyard somewhere in the abyss of my memory.

Thanks for the link. Good to know I was really good at that.

I played Solitaire with settings: vegas, deal three, for a while years ago and have gotten a similar record of around half a minute( I can't remember the actual number ). It was a similar scenario, where the cards were stacked really nice after the initial position was cleared. Then right click did most of the work.

The vegas setting had a money balance that would persist trough the games. And you started at -52$ if I remember correctly; usually my goal was to get over 200$ and clear the board. I would get this in about two out of three attempts.

Since with vegas you can only deal the deck three times, there is a strategy where you use the first deal and scan the deck, so you can reach the aces and lower numbers in the remaining two deals. But I quit playing before I got to master that.

That is simply staggering. I can barely get through one pass of the deck in 37 seconds.

Was that with three-card flip or one-card?

One card. Three is too hard and I get stuck too often.

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