Solitaire Pd

SolitairePD is a small, standalone Mac implementation of peg solitaire, the single-player puzzle in which you jump balls (or pegs) over each other to remove them from a board. It was written for new-world Macs running Carbonlib 1.73 and tested on early Mac OS X, and is published as a public-domain release of the author's wider commercial codebase.

The game

Peg solitaire is a centuries-old puzzle: each move jumps one ball over an orthogonally adjacent ball into an empty socket, removing the jumped ball. The goal is to clear the board down to a single ball resting in the centre socket. There are many published combinations of moves that achieve this, and part of the game's appeal is discovering one yourself rather than memorising a solution.

Look and feel

The author, David Christmass, says SolitairePD was designed with the iMac "balls" aesthetic in mind, fitting the late-1990s Bondi/Lifesaver visual language of the original iMacs. Players can choose any colour for the balls and any colour for the background, so the otherwise austere board can be skinned to match a desk or a mood.

Public-domain release

SolitairePD is the public-domain edition of the game, distributed without source. The same codebase has a registered/commercial sibling, but this build is free to use and redistribute; the read-me notes that some users may still be required to register depending on jurisdiction or use case, so the bundled documentation is worth a glance before deployment in an institutional setting.

System requirements and provenance

SolitairePD targets Power Macintosh hardware running Mac OS 9 or early Mac OS X via Carbon, and requires Carbonlib 1.73 or later. It was uploaded to Info-Mac by davidchristmass at netscape.net and is preserved in the cards (crd) section of the Info-Mac game tree.