Running old windows Solitaire

[DaOld Man]

I have a layout in my Mala called PC Games.
I have space commander, super tux kart and Fix it Felix in the selections.
I was thinking it might be neat to include some windows games, since I am running win10 64 bit OS.
My oldtime favorite years ago when I was trying to kill some slack time at work was solitaire.
So I thought why not?
But it turned out to be a challenge.
First I had to copy "sol.exe" and "cards.dll" from an old XP drive to my win10 drive.
Located in C:/windows/system32 folder of XP.
I then created a shortcut in my win10 to sol.exe. In the shortcut properties, I assign it to start maximized.
I then created a bat file to run from Mala to start the shortcut.
But there was a problem after quitting the game that mala still saw the emulator running.
Long story short: I fixed it with these commands in the bat file:

Code: [Select]

@echo off
start /wait "" "solitaire.exe - Shortcut"
exit /b 0

This works.

I can use my trackball as a mouse, but I dont have a mouse left click button on my CP, so I guess I got to add one.
You can use limited keyboard keys to play the game, but ESC does not quit the game.
(Have to click on the X in the title bar.)

Maybe this will help someone else who's trying to run a windows game from Mala.

[loadman]

Nice  —  that trick works for a whole class of games, not just sol.exe.

Wrapping the shortcut in `cmd /c start /wait ...` fixes it because cmd.exe stays alive until the target it started closes.

MaLa is waiting on cmd's PID, cmd is waiting on sol.exe.
Same pattern works for Steam/Epic launcher games, some standalone emulators that fork and exit, and anything else that runs behind a launcher stub — worth filing away.

I could possibly build something into MaLa to handle such things, how would you see it implimented if it was worth it?