The Eagle Has Landed

By Richard Dimond

Originally published in EUG #62

I have at last rewritten my three patience games and hope that you find they are improved and easier to play. The 'undo' facility has been completely rewritten. It now uses page &B00 for saving the data for your moves so you can go back as far as you like!

Scorpion now has the scoring and statistics routines. This proved more tricky than I expected as it was necessary to scan the deal each time for any sequences already in it. I have also modified the cueing instructions to show that the statistics can be printed.

There is also one new game : Eagle's Wing. It will only run on the Master 128 (or other BBC machine with the extra memory) as the program is very long. See the instructions too as they are rather lengthy. The options are set for a fairly easy game but they may be changed to make the game easier or more challenging. The options are set for a trunk of 17 and 2 re-deal of the stack. A routine is provided for building up the foundations automatically (Auto-play). This speeds up the game and also saves you having the remember the value of the base card. It is toggled on and off with the "A" key during play. It is perhaps not an ideal routine as it does not always complete all that can be added until a key is pressed. I tried to improve this but it slowed the program down too much.

In each game, RETURN saves your statistics before running the game again. ESCAPE will re-run the game without saving the data.

This is, of course, my final submission to EUG so I hope all is well. I have given each program a good check over and corrected a lot of things I wasn't satisfied with! I'm sorry the magazine is ending through a lack of support. I hope we can all keep in touch through the EUG web site or perhaps an occasional newsletter.