As I said in my other message "Its not only used by the MS card games but others as well. Its been reverse engineered by some people and also at some point MS released an "official" SDK for it (at http://www.microsoft.com/mind/0396/games.asp ) so if we dont clone it, people cant play non-ms games that use it"
However, there is a problem. Microsoft released a 16 bit version of cards.dll. Later on, they relased a new 32 bit version, also called cards.dll. Some games support the 16 bit version via thunks, some support the 32 bit version and some games try and detect both.
Firstly, is there some way I can implement cards.dll so that it presents the 16 bit interface to those apps that use the 16 bit thunks to talk to it and also so it presents the 32 bit interface to those apps that talk to it as a 32 bit dll?
Also, I am trying to catalog all the different versions of cards.dll that are out there. (in an attempt to catalog all the differences) I personally have: 1.cards.dll from Windows XP, size 359,936 version 5.1.2600.0. This one is a 32 bit version. 2.cards.dll from Win2k, size 153,360 version 5.0.2134.1. This one is a 32 bit version. 3.cards32.dll from the microsoft article linked to above, size 152,064, no versioninfo resource. This one is a 32 bit version. 4.cards.dll from win98, size 148,528, no versioninfo. This one is a 16 bit version.
Does anyone have any other versions, especially other 16 bit versions?
BTW, I am going to use the cards from http://www.jfitz.com/cards/index.html. As for the backs, anyone want to draw some? :)