search

tDavidM / Taipei

This is an accurate 32 bits clone of the original 1990 Taipei game (16 bits) written by Dave Norris that was included in the first Microsoft Entertainment Pack. This clone was made without any access to the original source code and is written in C++ using C++ Builder XE8. Check Compare.png for a preview. Remakes of Taipei were reintroduced with Windows 7 and 10 respectively as Mahjong Titans and Microsoft Mahjong.
MIT License
10 stars 0 forks source link

Excellent Port! #1

Open catmandu13 opened 9 months ago

catmandu13 commented 9 months ago

I like Mahjong as a concept and all, but I only play Dave Norris's Taipei because of one subtle, unadvertised, simple feature. The Fortunes. All other mahjong games I've ever played dont have that as a feature. It literally keeps me coming back to this Win3.1 app! It's a great reward for finishing the puzzle. Now with this port, I can continue playing on more modern hardware! So thank you so much for taking this on!!

Suggestions though, and take it or leave it since i know this is meant to be a true clone: Allow scaling for larger screens. It's kinda hard to see at it's original size on high resolution screens. Change background colors could be nice. If playing at work, that green is highly recognizable as a game. Updated tile artwork would be cool as an advanced option, but obviously not the default setting.

It's great as is though, and just wanted to know, there's people out there looking for this and grateful!!

tDavidM commented 9 months ago

Thanks for the comments, I greatly appreciate.

It not the first time I get the suggestion to increase the size, the only "difficulty" is scaling the tile images. The original images are 36 pixels wide and that's not a lot to work with. I tried scaling factor of 1.5 and 2 with at tool that seems to use bilinear interpolation and it looks ok-ish. I might try at a later time with bicubic and sharpening to see if I can get a better look. I've worked on implementing a zoom option for 150% and 200% last night and I'll upload that now, it's available as a "hidden" option, just press "T" on the keyboard while Taipei is open to get the hidden options.

For the background color, I'll keep it in mind, I've seen a less known/later version of Taipei that allowed the user to set any bitmap image as background. I would likely go with that option, I'm just not sure if it would be used much.

And as for the tile artwork, I might look at one possibility, if there's file with a specific name, (example: TileArt.bmp) in the same directory as the executable file, that image file would be loaded as tile artwork. I would need to source some alternative artwork to provide as example.

tDavidM commented 9 months ago

Made a second improvement this afternoon, I've moved to bi-cubic interpolation for the zoom/scaling, it looks much better. Also added a 125% option. Again, just press T in the main window to get the "hidden options".