Real Deal Video poker2

The Real Deal Video Poker (Info-Mac upload no. 2) is a late-1990s shareware video-poker simulator for the Macintosh by HGP at interaccess.com, billed in its own BinHex header as "the ultimate, most realistic game of video poker available - well, shy of Vegas, that is." Distributed as a fat 68k/PPC binary.

Gameplay

The Real Deal models a casino video-poker terminal - five-card draw against a paytable, with the player choosing which cards to hold and which to discard before the redraw, and the machine paying out from a fixed schedule starting at jacks-or-better. The pitch is straight realism: no cartoon flourishes, no novelty rule changes, just the cabinet experience moved onto a Mac screen.

Why two Info-Mac entries

This node corresponds to the second upload of the same title to Info-Mac (the slug suffix 2 is a version marker, not a sequel). Both uploads carry the same author signature (hgp@interaccess.com) and the same descriptive blurb, indicating an updated build of the same product rather than a separate game.

Engine and distribution

The release is a single BinHex 4.0 archive (real-deal-video-poker2.hqx) under info-mac/game/, packaged as a fat binary with both 68k and PowerPC code. There is no Macintosh Garden listing for the title, and no MobyGames record - it is pure Info-Mac shareware, surviving today only through the Info-Mac mirror tree.

Provenance

Author HGP (interaccess.com was a Chicago-area ISP active in the mid-to-late 1990s) self-published through the Info-Mac submission queue. Beyond the BinHex header itself, no contemporary reviews, screenshots, or developer-site captures appear to have been preserved, so the catalogue here relies on the in-archive description as the canonical source.