I don't know what it is, but I love implementing Solitaire to learn new languages and frameworks. It's always a fun exercise, and the engine gets better with every iteration. My latest attempt is <a href="https://solitaire.gg" rel="nofollow">https://solitaire.gg</a> - it's a Scala/Scala.js WebGL/websocket Phaser web/native app with hundreds of games.
For anyone who comes here without clicking the link, it's linking to a comment of the intern that actually wrote it. He provides some neat context as well. Worth the read if you don't mind being on Reddit at work.
He mentioned "KlondGmProc" and "DefColProc" as names of message passing routines, so google finds a single result [1] from win2ksrc.rar > klond.c, I think that might be the actual source code.<p>[1]: <a href="http://read.pudn.com/downloads3/sourcecode/windows/248345/win2k/private/windows/shell/games/sol/klond.c__.htm" rel="nofollow">http://read.pudn.com/downloads3/sourcecode/windows/248345/wi...</a>
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: an un-nervingly large amount of the work I've done over the years has had this property: the long-term value is inversely proportional to the time put into it. Learning from this correlation remains a big priority for me.
I remember playing 'spider' on my Sun system back in the day (it was a form of solitaire) and once Don Woods (who was also working at Sun at the time) walked past my office and said, "Oh you like that? I wrote it." To which I could only reply he was responsible to two major time wasters in my early career :-)
You used to be able to underflow the score in MS Solitaire by repeatedly dealing new hands (would subtract 52 points or so). I believe that, in Win95 at least, the score was a 16 bit signed variable so you could underflow it with a mere 1261 deals! I wonder if the modern one is 64 bits, and if you can still underflow it...
I hope someone is archiving this folklore properly. It's a bit scary that it's only in a Reddit thread.<p>(ditto for the stuff that's languishing in Google's Usenet archive.)
"He received no royalties for his work despite it being among the most used Windows applications of all time."<p>Anyone know why he would receive a "royalty" (esp. as an intern)? I've seen big bonuses/stock options but never a royalty.
An interesting bit is that the design for the game came from Susan Kare from NeXT [1] and had been on the original Macintosh team.<p>[1]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Kare#After_Apple" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Kare#After_Apple</a>
The card deck was designed by Susan Kare:<p><a href="http://kare.com/portfolio/17_microsoft_solataire.html" rel="nofollow">http://kare.com/portfolio/17_microsoft_solataire.html</a><p>Anybody knows if that happened only once MS decided to publish the game?
I wrote a clone of Solitaire in Turbo Pascal long time ago. I still remember the satisfaction of coming up with a recursive algo for uncovering safe tiles. The joy of understanding recursion, that was nice, ha ha!