Hi Shachar! 

Would you mind if I put this message of yours (or at your option, an HTML page 
that explains it all, which you or I will write.) on the Freecell Solver site 
and its mirror, as well as forward this message to the fc-solve-discuss 
mailing list. Another good thing would be to try to convince Mike Keller to 
include the text in the Freecell FAQ (which is available online under a 
non-specified license.) Your name could be added to the FAQ's contributors 
for prosperity... ;-)

Regards,

        Shlomi Fish

On Wednesday 11 May 2005 08:58, Shachar Shemesh wrote:
> Amos Shapira wrote:
> >On 5/9/05, Shlomi Fish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >>On Monday 09 May 2005 11:40, Amos Shapira wrote:
> >>>I'm not that deep into Windows administration, I just know that, as
> >>>far as I noticed,
> >>>I never had to bother with it.
> >>
> >>Well recently I heard of someone who told me MS Freecell (!!) does not
> >> start for him for some reason. (while almost everything else seems to be
> >> in working order) I said I had no idea how to resolve it, but pointed
> >> him to free (as-in-beer and possibly as-in-speech) alternatives.
> >
> >And you think this is an example of "DLL hell"?
> >Do you imply that he installed some program with a DLL which
> >broke his freecell?
>
> Actually, that's highly likely, yes. The following is pure guesswork,
> but educated one `-)
>
> Following a recent thread in Wine-devel, FreeCell requires "cards.dll".
> On Win 9x, this is a 16 bits DLL, which means that FreeCell loads it as
> a stub through a "thunk" (FreeCell has always been 32 bit, even on
> Windows 3.11). On Windows NT and up, Cards.dll is a 32 bit DLL. FreeCell
> accordingly directly links with it. Unlike MS's usual behavior on such
> occasions, they did not call it "cards32.dll". As a result, you have
> cards using programs that can work on Windows 9x, and programs that can
> work on Windows NT+, but it's very hard to make a program that will work
> on both.
>
> Frankly, this shouldn't matter so much. The interface for Cards.dll is
> undocumented, and so, in theory, only MS applications would use it.
> Cards.dll does, however, have a very visible, very useful, resource
> section, holding images of all the cards (plus silly animations). If
> another application brought it's own copy of Cards.dll, probably BECAUSE
> it knew it couldn't count on linking with the OS supplied one, then it
> is entirely conceivable that it broke FreeCell along the way.
>
>           Shachar

-- 

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Shlomi Fish      [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

Tcl is LISP on drugs. Using strings instead of S-expressions for closures
is Evil with one of those gigantic E's you can find at the beginning of 
paragraphs.

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