A Message from Jerry White (July 14, 2023):  

John Hardie gave me the equipment and opportunity to update my old Poker Solitaire program.  Since I am fully retired with time on my hands, I was thrilled with the opportunity.  I wrote that program in the early 80's before I became aware of things like player missile graphics.  I used the Atari cursor to indicate the current position within the grid.  It looks so much better now highlighting the entire box in gold.  I thought this program update would be easy, but I was wrong.

I had not touched an Atari keyboard in nearly 40 years, and I didn't have my original program.  Others had attempted to make changes.  There were routines in the program that simply did not work.  I didn't have my old programmer tools or documentation.  I also had to work with an old man's short-term memory failures and an attention span that can be measured in jiffies.  Going back and forth between my PC keyboard and the Atari was quite frustrating.  You don't have to hold down the CTRL key to use the arrow keys on the PC.  The PC is always in insert mode, the Atari doesn't work that way.  You get double quotes on the Atari with a <shift>+2. That will get you the @ sign on my PC. I had to continuously keep notes on paper to remind myself of line numbers where certain routines were located.  I felt like I had a case of C.R.S., Can't Remember Shit.

The poker hand evaluation process was painfully slow in basic, so I decided to use the ABC Compiler.  This presented a whole new set of problems when I added some music routines.  Even though I used the jiffy counter for note durations, everything needed adjustments.  This meant testing in basic, compiling, testing the compiled version, then back to basic over and over again.

Somehow, I made it through all of the frustration, and I am now fully satisfied with POKER SOLITAIRE 2023.  It is an interesting challenge for from 1 to 4 players, and I hope it will be enjoyed by many.

I encourage comments and suggestions about the game or any of my old software products using email.  Just put POKER SOLITAIRE 2023 in the subject line so I know it is not junk-mail and send to jplogical@msn.com.  I also would love to know if anyone beats my personal best score of 3,020.

Jerry White
