6 ms·

Remake of the Windows 95 Solitaire game

106 points by ctippett 3y ago

_wj22 2y ago
Original Author of the game here. It was a big surprise for me to see a jump in attention that my Solitaire remake got. Thank you all for taking a look at my repo and I hope that you enjoy playing the game. Minesweeper was also a lot of fun to remake, interestingly it took around 3-4 months of work to finish that before starting on Solitaire which took a little over a year to complete. When I was a young boy we had a Windows 95 machine and an Apple Macintosh at my elementary school, where I got introduced to Solitaire, Minesweeper, MS Flight Simulator, The Secret of Monkey Island, Hit the Road Sam and Max, and a bunch of other games and applications. I thought it would be nice to keep a little bit of that nostalgia around so I tried to remake Minesweeper and Solitaire as close to pixel perfection as I could. The Solitaire game still has to have the card animation support released which I am in middle of getting done. A bit of backstory on the mead.jar reference. I started making tic-tac-toe, checkers, and chess to get more into having a few small projects finished that I can look back and be proud of. While I worked on those three small games, I would reference this other Java project that would be in charge of asset management; I called this project Mead, which is the name of my Dwarf Ret Pally back in my WoW days. Mead is a code base that has a tile editor that lets you add in images to generate a tile map with simplistic layers, and with code generation support that when referenced from your Java project, would give you access to your tile map through a common interface. Think Tiled for MonoGame, but back in 2012 and with features specific to my games. I will also open source that project for everyone once everything gets upgraded to a more recent JRE. If you would like to check out my other games as I go along please feel free to follow my progress on GitHub. If you would like to contact me for questions on things that i did in my games please feel free to message me anytime. And it goes without saying that if ever I can help anyone out from the development side with your projects I will do my best just send me a ping. Again thank you all for trying out the Solitaire remake.
LeoPanthera 3y ago
A wonderful preservation effort, but I thought Solitaire originated with Windows 3.1. Are there any significant differences to the Windows 95 version?
- o11c 3y ago
  Windows 3.0 according to Wikipedia, which mentions no changes until Windows 2000. A little googling shows screenshots, obviously the widgets look a little different but no meaningful differences are apparent at a glance.
  - chungy 3y ago
    Indeed; Windows 2000 changed the card backgrounds, but it otherwise remained virtually unchanged from 1990 until 2007 when Vista changed it to be Direct3D accelerated and new graphics.
- matttproud 3y ago
  Indeed. I never played it on Windows 95, but I spent a lot of time playing it on Windows 3.1 (and probably 3.0). This looks essentially like the Windows 3.x version.
bitwize 3y ago
Microsoft has added premium subscriptions to modern Windows Solitaire, because it's 2024 and God has forsaken us. So this is a welcome project.
- appstorelottery 3y ago
  At first I thought you were joking; however a quick search reveals that indeed God has forsaken us. https://microsoftcasualgames.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/11785826776084-How-do-I-Purchase-a-Premium-Solitaire-Subscription https://microsoftcasualgames.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/1... The OS is now "free" and Solitaire is now paid product? Is this the pure definition of irony? OP: You've done a wonderful job with this!
  - ctippett 3y ago
    All credit goes to the original creator, I just posted the link :-)
  - wiktor-k 3y ago
    I had to use Windows machine to test an app recently and the amount of ads and other annoyances there is just mindblowing. I wanted to show Solitaire to my kids but it's so ad-ridden it's painful to play. I'm strongly considering just reformatting the drive and putting Linux in there.
  - bitwize 3y ago
    Consider Windows a live-service, free-to-play OS.
- AndrewDavis 3y ago
  I carry those old games from old windows installs. They won't run "natively" on modern windows, however someone ported a subset of WINE, winevdm, to windows called otvdm. I was playing Chips Challenge yesterday! https://github.com/otya128/winevdm https://github.com/otya128/winevdm
- LeFantome 3y ago
  $2 a month for solitaire?!?!
Dwedit 3y ago
Does that mean it has the ending animation that plays way too fast? They fixed that in Windows 2000.
- jamiek88 3y ago
  Ha! It wasn’t supposed to be like that crazy flinging of cards?! Nice to learn trivia about key memories from your youth.
mvkel 3y ago
Why climb Everest? Because it's there.
addminztrator 3y ago
So cool! I only started playing solitaire on XP though and it was slightly different
- accrual 3y ago
  I enjoyed "speed running" solitaire on XP during my computer classes in school. I kept a .txt files of my scores. Wish I still had it!
hoyd 3y ago
Please, redo Hearts from windows 3.11 too. :-)
juliusdavies 3y ago
You realize copyright applies to an application’s visual representation, too, right? Copyright isn’t just a code thing.
- boomboomsubban 3y ago
  It seems to have survived on github for about 6 years, so the copyright holders probably aren't bothered.
- ChickeNES 3y ago
  You could always have the end user drop in their legally obtained copy of CARDS.DLL from older versions of Windows, and then parse the NE to extract all of the card images...at least, that's what I did when I made a clone of Windows Solitaire :)
- saghm 3y ago
  Such a disappointing lack of regard for the impact this might have on Windows 95 sales going forward
userbinator 3y ago
Full installation of Windows 95 - ~64MB sol.exe - 167KB jre-9.0.4_windows-x64_bin.exe - 96.6MB (compressed) Solitaire.jar - 463KB It seems that even a VM containing all of Windows 95 would be smaller than a JRE and this version of Solitaire.
- raverbashing 3y ago
  It would be an interesting exercise to try the port using WxWindows or something similar
  - widge 3y ago
    wxWindows?
    - raverbashing 3y ago
      Called wxWidgets now https://www.wxwidgets.org/ https://www.wxwidgets.org/
- qingcharles 3y ago
  I saw a launcher in Task Manager today using 96MB of RAM. Its only job is to launch another app. For a couple of years I programmed on a device where ALL the apps combined had to total less than 8KB.
  - lionkor 3y ago
    Can we explain what this memory does? Is it just abstractions ontop of abstractions etc?
    - qingcharles 3y ago
      The app simply has an image and a button that says "OPEN" on it, which launches the other app. I'm guessing it is Electron or something and underneath it is loading an entire web browser engine to display the image and the button.
39Wc 3y ago
Seems the entire game engine is missing from the source code, instead it comes bundled with a jar file in the classpath called "mead.jar". I wonder why the author thought that was a good idea. I was actually looking forward to studying the game engine itself.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- LeFantome 3y ago
  Unless he took steps to obscure it. you still have the source code. Java is trivial to decompile.
  - 39Wc 2y ago
    Why not release the source code as an open source project then, and add a proper maven dependency instead of bundling a jar file?
pharrington 3y ago
see also https://worldofsolitaire.com/ https://worldofsolitaire.com/ and https://www.solitaireforfree.com/ https://www.solitaireforfree.com/ ( self plug, it is not my website/domain, but it is my code)
squarefoot 3y ago
Hijacking the thread to ask if anyone could explain why Aisleriot, an otherwise quite good Linux solitaire game, seems to poorly randomize cards, at least when playing the classic Klondike. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Aisleriot https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Aisleriot (no need to run Gnome to play it) The apparent bug was already reported 4 and 2 years ago on different games.
leighleighleigh 3y ago
Hell yes, I just spent half a day theming my Linux box with Chicago95! I've already got Space Cadet pinball from Flatpak, and now I've got Solitaire - nostalgia levels are off the charts right now B-)
- verve_rat 3y ago
  I'd like to try this out at some stage. Any tips? Any thing that caught you out?
  - jwrallie 3y ago
    I also recently tried chicago95, it seems to have some issues with the latest Xfce version, so if you see your notification area icons have squares around them, there is a workaround on the GitHub issues page of the project. When I used the workaround, the taskbar lost its 3D border effect, so I recovered that by using a background image that is 1 pixel wide and has the correct colors to have the 3D effect. It’s better if you use something like Xubuntu 22.04 first to see how it should look like without this bug.
ctippett 3y ago
I came across this project after seeing a mod for the game Balatro [1] that used the artwork from the original Solitaire sourced from this repo. The README was so wholesome I thought. The developer obviously put a lot of care and attention into creating something they're proud of and hoped others would enjoy. I hope the person who created this notices the influx of attention its now getting and gets a kick out of it. [1] https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3223727481 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=32237...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
smusamashah 3y ago
There is JS Solitaire as well which looks exactly like win 98 solitaire. https://github.com/1j01/98/tree/master/programs/js-solitaire https://github.com/1j01/98/tree/master/programs/js-solitaire
- ygra 3y ago
  Looks, maybe, but it plays very differently.
romwell 3y ago
I still play the original Win 3.11 Solitaire (same as the Win 95 one, more or less) - which, rather remarkably, still runs on Windows 10.
- efdee 3y ago
  Nitpicking but the original is from Windows 3.0 ;-)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tcmb 3y ago
(2019)

106 points by ctippett 3y ago

Original Author of the game here. It was a big surprise for me to see a jump in attention that my Solitaire remake got. Thank you all for taking a look at my repo and I hope that you enjoy playing the game. Minesweeper was also a lot of fun to remake, interestingly it took around 3-4 months of work to finish that before starting on Solitaire which took a little over a year to complete. When I was a young boy we had a Windows 95 machine and an Apple Macintosh at my elementary school, where I got introduced to Solitaire, Minesweeper, MS Flight Simulator, The Secret of Monkey Island, Hit the Road Sam and Max, and a bunch of other games and applications. I thought it would be nice to keep a little bit of that nostalgia around so I tried to remake Minesweeper and Solitaire as close to pixel perfection as I could. The Solitaire game still has to have the card animation support released which I am in middle of getting done. A bit of backstory on the mead.jar reference. I started making tic-tac-toe, checkers, and chess to get more into having a few small projects finished that I can look back and be proud of. While I worked on those three small games, I would reference this other Java project that would be in charge of asset management; I called this project Mead, which is the name of my Dwarf Ret Pally back in my WoW days. Mead is a code base that has a tile editor that lets you add in images to generate a tile map with simplistic layers, and with code generation support that when referenced from your Java project, would give you access to your tile map through a common interface. Think Tiled for MonoGame, but back in 2012 and with features specific to my games. I will also open source that project for everyone once everything gets upgraded to a more recent JRE. If you would like to check out my other games as I go along please feel free to follow my progress on GitHub. If you would like to contact me for questions on things that i did in my games please feel free to message me anytime. And it goes without saying that if ever I can help anyone out from the development side with your projects I will do my best just send me a ping. Again thank you all for trying out the Solitaire remake.

LeoPanthera 3y ago

A wonderful preservation effort, but I thought Solitaire originated with Windows 3.1. Are there any significant differences to the Windows 95 version?

o11c 3y ago
Windows 3.0 according to Wikipedia, which mentions no changes until Windows 2000. A little googling shows screenshots, obviously the widgets look a little different but no meaningful differences are apparent at a glance.
- chungy 3y ago
  Indeed; Windows 2000 changed the card backgrounds, but it otherwise remained virtually unchanged from 1990 until 2007 when Vista changed it to be Direct3D accelerated and new graphics.
matttproud 3y ago
Indeed. I never played it on Windows 95, but I spent a lot of time playing it on Windows 3.1 (and probably 3.0). This looks essentially like the Windows 3.x version.

bitwize 3y ago

Microsoft has added premium subscriptions to modern Windows Solitaire, because it's 2024 and God has forsaken us. So this is a welcome project.

appstorelottery 3y ago
At first I thought you were joking; however a quick search reveals that indeed God has forsaken us. https://microsoftcasualgames.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/11785826776084-How-do-I-Purchase-a-Premium-Solitaire-Subscription https://microsoftcasualgames.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/1... The OS is now "free" and Solitaire is now paid product? Is this the pure definition of irony? OP: You've done a wonderful job with this!
- ctippett 3y ago
  All credit goes to the original creator, I just posted the link :-)
- wiktor-k 3y ago
  I had to use Windows machine to test an app recently and the amount of ads and other annoyances there is just mindblowing. I wanted to show Solitaire to my kids but it's so ad-ridden it's painful to play. I'm strongly considering just reformatting the drive and putting Linux in there.
- bitwize 3y ago
  Consider Windows a live-service, free-to-play OS.
AndrewDavis 3y ago
I carry those old games from old windows installs. They won't run "natively" on modern windows, however someone ported a subset of WINE, winevdm, to windows called otvdm. I was playing Chips Challenge yesterday! https://github.com/otya128/winevdm https://github.com/otya128/winevdm
LeFantome 3y ago
$2 a month for solitaire?!?!

Dwedit 3y ago

Does that mean it has the ending animation that plays way too fast? They fixed that in Windows 2000.

jamiek88 3y ago
Ha! It wasn’t supposed to be like that crazy flinging of cards?! Nice to learn trivia about key memories from your youth.

mvkel 3y ago

Why climb Everest? Because it's there.

addminztrator 3y ago

So cool! I only started playing solitaire on XP though and it was slightly different

accrual 3y ago
I enjoyed "speed running" solitaire on XP during my computer classes in school. I kept a .txt files of my scores. Wish I still had it!

hoyd 3y ago

Please, redo Hearts from windows 3.11 too. :-)

juliusdavies 3y ago

You realize copyright applies to an application’s visual representation, too, right? Copyright isn’t just a code thing.

boomboomsubban 3y ago
It seems to have survived on github for about 6 years, so the copyright holders probably aren't bothered.
ChickeNES 3y ago
You could always have the end user drop in their legally obtained copy of CARDS.DLL from older versions of Windows, and then parse the NE to extract all of the card images...at least, that's what I did when I made a clone of Windows Solitaire :)
saghm 3y ago
Such a disappointing lack of regard for the impact this might have on Windows 95 sales going forward

userbinator 3y ago

Full installation of Windows 95 - ~64MB sol.exe - 167KB jre-9.0.4_windows-x64_bin.exe - 96.6MB (compressed) Solitaire.jar - 463KB It seems that even a VM containing all of Windows 95 would be smaller than a JRE and this version of Solitaire.

raverbashing 3y ago
It would be an interesting exercise to try the port using WxWindows or something similar
- widge 3y ago
  wxWindows?
  - raverbashing 3y ago
    Called wxWidgets now https://www.wxwidgets.org/ https://www.wxwidgets.org/
qingcharles 3y ago
I saw a launcher in Task Manager today using 96MB of RAM. Its only job is to launch another app. For a couple of years I programmed on a device where ALL the apps combined had to total less than 8KB.
- lionkor 3y ago
  Can we explain what this memory does? Is it just abstractions ontop of abstractions etc?
  - qingcharles 3y ago
    The app simply has an image and a button that says "OPEN" on it, which launches the other app. I'm guessing it is Electron or something and underneath it is loading an entire web browser engine to display the image and the button.

39Wc 3y ago

Seems the entire game engine is missing from the source code, instead it comes bundled with a jar file in the classpath called "mead.jar". I wonder why the author thought that was a good idea. I was actually looking forward to studying the game engine itself.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
LeFantome 3y ago
Unless he took steps to obscure it. you still have the source code. Java is trivial to decompile.
- 39Wc 2y ago
  Why not release the source code as an open source project then, and add a proper maven dependency instead of bundling a jar file?

pharrington 3y ago

see also https://worldofsolitaire.com/ https://worldofsolitaire.com/ and https://www.solitaireforfree.com/ https://www.solitaireforfree.com/ ( self plug, it is not my website/domain, but it is my code)

squarefoot 3y ago

Hijacking the thread to ask if anyone could explain why Aisleriot, an otherwise quite good Linux solitaire game, seems to poorly randomize cards, at least when playing the classic Klondike. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Aisleriot https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Aisleriot (no need to run Gnome to play it) The apparent bug was already reported 4 and 2 years ago on different games.

leighleighleigh 3y ago

Hell yes, I just spent half a day theming my Linux box with Chicago95! I've already got Space Cadet pinball from Flatpak, and now I've got Solitaire - nostalgia levels are off the charts right now B-)

verve_rat 3y ago
I'd like to try this out at some stage. Any tips? Any thing that caught you out?
- jwrallie 3y ago
  I also recently tried chicago95, it seems to have some issues with the latest Xfce version, so if you see your notification area icons have squares around them, there is a workaround on the GitHub issues page of the project. When I used the workaround, the taskbar lost its 3D border effect, so I recovered that by using a background image that is 1 pixel wide and has the correct colors to have the 3D effect. It’s better if you use something like Xubuntu 22.04 first to see how it should look like without this bug.

ctippett 3y ago

I came across this project after seeing a mod for the game Balatro [1] that used the artwork from the original Solitaire sourced from this repo. The README was so wholesome I thought. The developer obviously put a lot of care and attention into creating something they're proud of and hoped others would enjoy. I hope the person who created this notices the influx of attention its now getting and gets a kick out of it. [1] https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3223727481 https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=32237...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

smusamashah 3y ago

There is JS Solitaire as well which looks exactly like win 98 solitaire. https://github.com/1j01/98/tree/master/programs/js-solitaire https://github.com/1j01/98/tree/master/programs/js-solitaire

ygra 3y ago
Looks, maybe, but it plays very differently.

romwell 3y ago

I still play the original Win 3.11 Solitaire (same as the Win 95 one, more or less) - which, rather remarkably, still runs on Windows 10.

efdee 3y ago
Nitpicking but the original is from Windows 3.0 ;-)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tcmb 3y ago

(2019)