Re: OT: W98-related question

[J R FOX jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

--- Harry Binswanger  wrote:

> Jordan,

> I don't recall freecell being actually full screen
> on Win 98--just that you
> could make the window larger (as with all Windows
> windows). Are you sure
> it's not a screen resolution issue? Maybe your newer
> system has a higher
> screen res than your W98 one,


Hi Harry, and thanks for the reply.

My memory on this is far from certain, though I do
seem to recall running FreeCell that way. The display
could even go to full screen via ALT-ENTER, something
that is definitely not available (for this window)
under W2K.

I never actually ran W98 on a system of my own (at
that time, I was probably still running NT-4), only
now and then as a guest on other people's systems.
I'm not sure how they had those systems set up, and
they no longer run W98, so I have no way to test it
out at this point. But your screen resolution theory
is quite possible, as an explanation.

> and the smaller size
> that results is causing
> your discomfort.

I wouldn't say discomfort -- more like preference. I
run both W2K and eCS at 1024 x 768. On the eCS side,
I run Seahaven Towers, which is very much of the
FreeCell genre, though in my opinion superior in
several respects. It has no problem whatever going
from a window to full-screen size, according to one's
preference of the moment.

> If it helps, my CARDS.DLL is dated 8/04/04 and is
359936 bytes.

I'll compare, but that file date sounds like it must
belong to an XP version . . . .

This got stranger and stranger the more I looked into
it. The W98 FreeCell I extracted from a relative's
old hard drive is version 4.10. The stock W2K version
is 5.0. So there should be no doubt as to which
version is running, right ? (And they would each hold
different scores or "statistics." I'm a far better
player than she is, staying in the 73 - 77 % of games
won area.) It took me plenty of testing to figure this
out, because there are some built-in redundancies: the
files FreeCell.Exe and Cards.Dll exist in at least two
places in W2K -- \System32 and \System32\DLLcache.
When you delete them -- as I did, inside the running
W2K -- they spring right back, automatically. So, I
had to boot to the alternate W2K Maintenance
Partition, to reach "across the border" to zap those
files and replace them with the W98 file versions.
But, when I went back to the primary W2K boot
partition, and ran FreeCell again, damn if it doesn't
always *still* come up reporting Version 5.0, looking
just the same, with the scores from that version !
Why can't these files be killed and replaced ? My
guess: they must be springing back from somewhere
else, probably the huge Pagefile. If there is no way
to force running the older version executables, the
screen resolution idea may not be susceptible to
testing.


Jordan