Old newb stuff, but fun -- hacking WinXP Solitaire

The Solitaire game in Windoze XP was as good as it ever got, except for the dorky card backs and the godawful menu that blew away too many good games because "Undo" was not at the top where it should be. Easy enough to fix. And if you've moved on to Vista, you can still use it, just drop sol.exe and cards.dll someplace safe and go.

1. Get (http://www.angusj.com/resourcehacker) Resource Hacker, and maybe (http://www.wilsonc.demon.co.uk/d10resourceeditor.htm) XN Resource Editor too.

2. Copy Sol.exe and Cards.dll from C:\Windows\System32\  to a working folder.

3. Fix the stupidly annoying menu:
 Open Sol.exe in ResHacker. There is only one menu, and it's a breeze to do a little cut-and-paste to move the various parts around. You might want to copy the menu text into a text editor (Notepad, NOT WORD!) to work with it, and paste it all back
after the changes. Then click the "Compile script" button and save the file.

4. Better card backs:
 You will need to make a dozen 71 by 96 pixel bitmaps. Open Cards.dll in ResHacker and save one of the originals for a template.

Use any pics you like, as long as they look decent resized and cropped to fit. You don't need bloody Photoshop for this, IrfanView will do the whole job. MSPaint might come in handy too.

When you have the backs done, open Cards.dll again and replace all of the card backs with your own pics. "Compile" with each change, and save when done.

If you feel like doing something really tedious, you can change the fronts of the cards too. It might be easier to do this with XN Resource Editor. I don't know, the only time I did it was with the old win9x version. That was a pain in the buttons because the backs are in the EXE and they are 16 color. The fronts, the pip side, are two-color bitmaps in either version - the two colors are black and white, and red and white, and this freaks out some image editors. I did it, anyway; I changed hearts to pawprints for my sister the animal lover.

NOW - If you're still using XP, download and run the (http://fileforum.betanews.com/detail/Windows_File_Protection_Switcher/1106499902/1) Windows File Protection Switcher, unless you would rather do it the fun way by booting into Safe Mode to switch the files, or have already blown WFP away.

Replace the original files with the altered ones. Enjoy your custom deck of cards.

 *Sigh* Ah, nostalgia - I had some great hacked stuff in win98. No system file was sacred.