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You used to be able to underflow the score in MS Solitaire by repeatedly dealing new hands (would subtract 52 points or so). I believe that, in Win95 at least, the score was a 16 bit signed variable so you could underflow it with a mere 1261 deals! I wonder if the modern one is 64 bits, and if you can still underflow it...

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IIRC Windows did a thing where they wanted all the software they shipped to be 64 bit. That's why some of the games like pinball were removed.

I loved pinball! :(

For pinball, there was a bug with the collision detector in the 64 bit version they could not fix.

"Two of us tried to debug the program to figure out what was going on, but given that this was code written several years earlier by an outside company, and that nobody at Microsoft ever understood how the code worked (much less still understood it), and that most of the code was completely uncommented, we simply couldn’t figure out why the collision detector was not working. Heck, we couldn’t even find the collision detector!"

Source: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=...

As a newbie dev, I'm happy to see that even experts have difficulty navigating third-party code!

This article has a pesky agenda that needs to be filtered for, but might be relevant: http://www.theverge.com/2015/12/30/10691290/twitter-mac-outs...

Sometimes I have trouble with my own code if it is old enough. :)

The best one is when you read the code, say "this guy is terrible, who is it" and then find out it was you

I wonder how they did collision detection? I know pinball had a perspective view, but surely items were mapped on a 2D grid and detection done by comparing ball.xy versus object.xy ?

A cite for that if anyone cares: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20121218-00/?p=...

I once played a game of Solitaire on (IIRC) Win95 that had/allowed a red card placed on another red card. Pretty sure I still have the screenshot around somewhere (though that would be easy to fake).

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