FreeCell (Microsoft, Windows, 2007)

FreeCell
Developers: Oberon Media, Microsoft Publisher: Microsoft Platform: Windows Released internationally: January 30, 2007 This game has unused code. This game has debugging material.

To do: See if more of the options work in the Vista version. This was tested with the Windows 7 version. There's much more to document. A good place to start would be to use Resource Hacker on the game executable and DLLs. Add sub-page for "Media Center FreeCell", a full-screen version of the game embedded into the game's executable which although is technically used as it can be launched from Windows Media Center, it is not documented in any Help menus, and it also contains a whole bunch of unused content the normal game doesn't. Multiple prototypes of this game exist in various Windows Longhorn/Vista Beta builds, collect all of them and create a Prototypes sub-page. Win8 DP1 (6.2.8102.0 (winmain_win8m3.110823-1455)) saw the removal of the built-in Windows games from the edition manifest for Prerelease(ARM); this change would be later expanded through the removal of most Win7 client editions (excluding Starter(N), Professional(N) and Enterprise(N)) from the source tree during early 830x, orphaning the games entirely. The only catch to this, however, is that the Win7 games were still compiled from until as late as Win10 v1703, which is when MS decided to ditch the rest of the older editions entirely. The binaries were included in the provided repair content sources for the following builds: 8250 (Win8 Consumer Preview), 8400 (Win8 Release Preview), 9200 (Win8 RTM), 9431 (Win8.1 BlueMP), 9600 (Blue RTM), 10586 (Win10 v1511) and 14393 x86 (Win10 v1607). As the enablement flags for the games are still present in every SKU's product policies, it'd be a good idea if someone were to re-enable them through ProductPolicyEditor and look through any noticeable code changes from within their binaries.

One of the card games that were remastered for Vista / 7, only to be killed off in 8.

Debug Mode

As with many of the other included Windows Vista / 7 games, this has an internal g_debugEnabled variable. When that variable is to set to a non-zero value, it replaces the normal menu with this one. "Toggle Hint Rankings" and "Tweak" have no code behind them, while "Toggle Cheat Keys" enables the ; key which lets the game play the next move.

Setting the g_debugEnabled variable also enables the cheat keys allowing any move, block, and pause modes. It also logs as described on the Solitaire page.

XInput Support

An interesting feature that isn't documented anywhere (Help Menu-wise) is XInput (gamepad) support – if the game detects an Xbox 360 controller plugged into a USB port, the P1 corner on the controller will light up, signifying the controller can be used. Possibly undocumented because Microsoft thought people were too used to the traditional controls, and a gamepad wouldn't work for a card game. It's a neat little feature, nonetheless.

Controls

Button	Effect
Left analog stick/D-pad/Shoulder Buttons/Triggers	Moves the cursor. Oddly, they can also be used to navigate the menu bar.
B/Back	Undoes the previous move.
A/X	Selects the card the cursor is on. Moving the cursor onto another card and pressing A or X again moves the previous card onto the stack. Double-tapping either button moves a card to the home stack.
Y/Start	Opens the Game Menu.