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The Roots of the W4Row Game

The game to get four chip in line is well known under a different name, but this name was changed in order to avoid trade mark infringement. If someone knows more about the legal background, please let me know.

Back in the mid eighties I developed the first version of this game in Turbo Pascal 2 on a 8 MHz 8086 PC. I used ANSI-Color ESC-sequences to draw red and yellow spaces on the screen. In the early nineties I ported it to C in order to run it on faster machines. 1996 I grabbed the old 5.25" diskette again and created a CGI interface. The program was called WFrow version 1.0. Throughout this port and patch history the code became more and more chaotic.

Finishing the Game

In April 1997 I visited a friend who wrote the same game as a Windows program with Borland Delphi. I really liked his clever algorithm for evaluating the value of a playing position. Besides the standard Minimax which calculates moves in advance, you need to judge this advanced moves. I slightly enhanced his program ported it to C and included it in my code.

Now the code became too chaotic and I decided to do at least a minimal "garbage collection". I also translated everything from German to English in order to publish it. This is now W4Row Version 2.0. I know that meanwhile C++ arrived, but I decided to stay with plain vanilla K&R-style C, because some UNIX machines are still delivered with such a compiler.

The Future of the Game

There is room for improvement:

If you have more ideas or better, if you implement some of them, please let me know. If you should not reach me with the email address indicated below, it might have been changed. I intend to update directory servers like Four11, InfoSpace, WhoWhere, Bigfoot or Switchboard

Christian Barmala