OT: W98-related question

[J R FOX jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

I'm posting this here because I know that (at least)
Patricia still uses W98, and there are likely others
here who do also. I recalled that the FreeCell game
in W98 could be run at full-screen size, whereas the
later versions in W2K or XP cannot. (The maximum is a
vertical half-size . . . unless there is some Registry
hack for this.) So I took the trouble to extract the
W98 version game from an old hard drive. It would not
run at all in the later Win, giving an error message
about a library file needed, and what I took to be a
16-bit / 32-bit incompatibility.

Some searching on the web turned up a message
indicating that the missing library file was an
earlier version of Cards.DLL. I copied that over to
the FreeCell-98 directory I had established. Now the
earlier version seems to load -- or does it ? "Help |
About" yields the same version #, and the display size
continues to be limited. At first, I thought the
later .DLL was pre-empting, no matter what. But most
likely the newer version of FreeCell is what continues
to run.

I wouldn't waste the space here, but the question does
have implications for running *other* older 16-bit
Windows items. In a case like this, how do you match
up support files and *force* the older stuff to run ?
I gather there may be some other subsystem emulators
akin to DOSBOX that can handle this task.


Jordan