4 ms·
Looking at the deprecated features that won't make it to Windows 10 I see: > Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Hearts Games that come pre-installed on Windows 7 will
by tdicola 11y ago
Looking at the deprecated features that won't make it to Windows 10 I see:
> Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Hearts Games that come pre-installed on Windows 7 will be removed as part of installing the Windows 10 upgrade. Microsoft has released our version of Solitaire and Minesweeper called the “Microsoft Solitaire Collection” and “Microsoft Minesweeper.”
Does anyone else find it kind of sad that they killed off the old solitaire and minesweeper games? Part of what made Windows great was its incredible focus on backwards compatibility and it was always fun to load up solitaire, minesweeper, etc. in all their classic win 32 glory just like they ran in Windows 95.
The new games are weird microtransaction/subscription-based things that I'm sure marketing folks are extremely proud of but seem to have killed a bit of the soul of Windows. If nothing else the old games should have stayed in to show people that yes it's still your old Windows and apps written years ago will mostly just work.
- frou_dh 11y agoWouldn't be surprised if, at one time, those Solitaire & Minesweeper might have laid claim to being the most played videogames in the world.
- mkr-hn 11y agoThey would have been in competition with NES, Master System, SNES, and Genesis games for that record. After that, Minesweeper and Solitaire probably don't come close.
- SmellyGeekBoy 11y agoI recently got a Windows Phone and installed the 10 preview - I was pretty amazed to see ads and "powerups" in Minesweeper! It is indeed sad that they've gone and ruined it.
- veli_joza 11y agoI really don't care about this, why should we expect MS to support their 20 years old software? Back in '95 internet was not that common so it was nice to have such time wasters built into the OS. On the other hand, including Minecraft would be a really interesting decision.
- tdicola 11y agoBecause for years Microsoft built up a reputation for supporting old software and old APIs. Read Raymond Chen's Old New Thing blog for some anecdotes about the amazing lengths they would go internally to keep old software working. Like with the classic game Sim City they realized its code was buggy and using uninitialized memory, so the Windows team wrote a special case to detect when Sim City runs and emulate an older compatible memory allocator. It's not really clear if MS today cares about supporting software like they used to.
- k-mcgrady 11y ago>> "Because for years Microsoft built up a reputation for supporting old software and old APIs." That's a reputation they need to lose. It was important at one time but has been holding them back for years.
- stan_rogers 11y agoSolitaire and Minesweeper were actually there to help users get used to using a mouse (Minesweeper was about click and Solitaire was about drag-and-drop). They became dedicated time-wasters later, but they did actually serve a purpose at one time.
- signal11 11y agoI just noticed that the old EXEs -- sol.exe and winmine.exe -- are not bundled with Windows 7 (Win7 has Solitaire.exe and MineSweeper.exe). I wonder if copying the EXEs over to Win10 will work.
- dmsimpkins 11y agoI don't know about just copying the executable, but I just copied the entire folder that contains MineSweeper.dll, Minesweeper.exe, and an XML license file over to a VM and was able to run the game from there. The folder is located under C:\Windows\winsxs\ - Just search for the exe and you'll find it.
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y agoWell, you can always play the Windows 95 versions: http://win95.ajf.me/ http://win95.ajf.me/ (disclaimer: I made the site)
- currysausage 11y agoIf the "Microsoft Solitaire Collection" only wasn't so slow.
- OniBait 11y agoYeah. I like it better than the "old" Solitaire, but it can make my tablet crawl (is a Yoga2 Pro core i7). Turning off thermal management in the bios seems to have fixed a lot of the weird speed related issues I got in Win8/10 though.