Bug in Solitaire
I just found a bug in Solitaire! Arguably one of the most tried and tested components of Windows.
I was playing in Vegas mode and had gone through my stack, in an effort to do some last minute rearranging I was placing cards from the Ace piles back onto the table. I pulled the 9 of diamonds down and accidentally dropped it on the 9 of spades and it stuck, bringing the 8 of diamonds with it. There must have been something else special about what I did though because I have tried to engineer similar situations and am not seeing the same behavior.
Yes, I know, I play too much Solitaire!
Labels: Programming
posted by David Nicholson at
6:53 PM
2 Comments:
no no u play WAY WAY WAYYYYYYY too much solitare!!!
By
Anonymous, At
11:16 AM
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I found this years ago, back in the days of Windows 3.1. I verified that it also existed in 3.0, and has existed in every Solitaire all the way up through XP. I’d love to see if it also exists in pre-3.0 versions such as Windows 1.0, 2.0, 2.0/286, and 2.0/386, if those even came with Solitaire games.
Until now, I thought I was the only person in or outside of Microsoft who knew about this, other than those I’ve told. Unlike you, though, I know why it happens, and can reproduce it at will.
Basically, you know how the four goal stacks of cards at the top will, if you stack enough up there, offset every four cards a few pixels to the right to give the impression of 3-D depth to the stack?
Well, if you grab carefully (or accidentally, as you did) on one of the offset cards rather than the middle of the top card, it picks up the stack from the top-most card shifted by that number of pixels on up. You can then place the whole stack wherever it would normally be legal to place that one card (on a playing stack whose bottommost card is of the opposite color and next highest rank), and the cards being carried with it by the mouse will fall below it on that same stack, just as would normally happen if you’d dragged from another playing stack instead of a goal stack. Since those cards are all of the same suit and ascending rank, you get the effect I showed and that you saw with two cards.
Since every fourth card in the goal stacks is offset by an additional few pixels, you can do this with the first card being a 4 (as per my screen capture), 8 (as per yours), or Queen (effectively 12), but no other cards.
Since the Vista Solitaire is completely redone at least visually if not internally, I wonder if the bug happens in it as well? I’ve not yet installed the Vista Beta to find out.
By
Anonymous, At
8:00 AM
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