I wish you all the best. Once you find what you're looking for please let me know where I may find it.

May God bless you.

As the author, I don't understand what's difficult. The user has to start the main program, choose "New Local Game" from the Game menu, and hit Start. What's complicated about that?

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It's very much not obvious to a user like my Mom that that's what you'd want to click on. Sigh ... it's difficult to design a UI around more casual users.

Maybe it would work better if there were menu options for "New 1 Player Game" ... "New 4 Player Game" instead of "New Local Game" - and for these buttons to immediately start a new game rather than bringing up an option screen.

All I know is that my Mom got really confused when I tried to show her how to use it, and she couldn't deal with detailed written/drawn directions on what to do. She never played the game.

FWIW, she was also daunted by Kajongg so maybe it's just hopeless.

The old DOS game she used to play all the time simply started into a game immediately upon execution. So all she had to do was type the executable name and press Enter and that was it.

Nowadays, she mostly plays some slot machine style games on her Android phone.

FWIW, the DOS Mah Jong game I'm personally familiar with is called Hong Kong Mah Jong. It has very good audio and sound direction.

It may have had CGA support (which would make it a candidate for the game you're thinking of), but it was released well after the VGA era.

If it helps any, this CGA only game had zero english. I'm guessing it was written in Taiwan, and my dad got a hand on his copy via the local Taiwanese-American community. It didn't seem like a commercial game release.

Are you still looking for a good solution?
My wife and I both play Mahjong, with 3 robots, and I use a simple script to do all the complicated stuff.
The simple script, I got from Julian Bradfield,(who is I believe the original author), this launches 3 robots. I modified the scrip to allow choosing the number of humans and launches the needed robots.
I assume I can paste a 52 line bash script in a reply post.

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Cool, thanks! To be honest, my mother is not playing any computer Majong lately. She seems pretty happy with some Android games on her phone (not Majong). But if she feels like it, I'll see about setting it up for her.

Thanks again!

Here is my script. It's as simple as I can make it, with the exception, I included the option to minimize chows in the robots.
The player is "Mom' and the robots are "Tom", "Dick", and "Harry", change them to whatever you want.
Create an entry on the desktop or in the menu

#!/bin/bash
# ~/bin/mahjong.sh
# This script starts mj-server, mj-player and xmj with options.


if [ "$1" = "-h" -o "$1" = "--help" ]; then
echo
echo " Usage: mahjong.sh (No arguments, start from a menu)"
echo " Before first game, change oponent names to something appropriate."
exit 0
fi

/usr/games/mj-server --server localhost:5000 --exit-on-disconnect &

sleep 3 && mj-player --server localhost:5000 --chowness -0.7 --name Tom &
sleep 3 && mj-player --server localhost:5000 --chowness -0.7 --name Dick &
sleep 3 && mj-player --server localhost:5000 --chowness -0.7 --name Harry &

/usr/games/xmj --server localhost:5000 --name $(echo $USER) --connect

exit 0

Happy playing

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