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Starting with Windows 8 Microsoft has, in their infinite wisdom, decided to remove preinstalled (inbox) games such as FreeCell and Minesweeper various versions of which were included in Windows since 1995 and 1992 respectively.

Games were made available in Microsoft Store and even included as pre-provisioned in Windows 10 and 11, but wouldn't you rather play the old version say from Windows 7 instead of installing some "app" from the store which despite being free has in-app purchases, possibly ads, and most definitely usage tracking?

If you would like to play those old games I am sure you could find them available for download on some seedy websites but how about me showing you how to get them yourself straight from the source?

Still reading? Let's roll up our sleeves, crack our fingers and get to work.

Prerequisites:

  1. Windows 7 SP1 x64 ISO image (get it legally from here, as long as you have a valid product key)

Once you have the ISO image, first step is to open it and get a file called install.wim. In Windows 10 and 11 you can just mount the ISO image by double-clicking the ISO file, otherwise you can use 7-Zip to extract the ISO contents to a folder of your choice.

Next you need to mount the install.wim contents to a folder using the following command:

DISM.EXE /Mount-Image /ImageFile:install.wim /Index:3 /MountDir:C:\MNT

In the above command, Index parameter specifies which image to mount from install.wim file. Since install.wim you are working on contains four images (Home Basic, Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate) you have to specify 3 to select Professional image. MountDir parameter naturally specifies the folder where contents of the image will be mounted and it goes without saying that it should exist before executing the command.

Once the mounting process completes successfully (which takes some time during which you can grab a cup of espresso) you can navigate to that folder to copy the game executables from it.

For FreeCell you need the following files:

  • FreeCell.exe.mui
  • CardGames.dll
  • FreeCell.exe
  • FreeCellMCE.png

For Minesweeper, you need the following files:

  • Minesweeper.exe.mui
  • MineSweeper.dll
  • MineSweeper.exe

All of them will be found strewn around in various sub-folders of C:\MNT\Windows\WinSXS folder so the easiest way is to search by name from there.

In Windows 7, those two games are installed in C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\FreeCell and C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Minesweeper. You can make those folders in your Windows 10 or 11 installation or simply put the games anywhere you like, even both in the same folder if you want. The only thing you need to do is to put files with .mui extension in a sub-folder called en-US in your game folder.

Once that is done, don't forget to dismount the install.wim using the following command:

DISM.EXE /Unmount-Image /MountDir:C:\MNT /Discard

Then you can try running the games and... nothing happens.

I can already hear your frustrated groans, all this trouble for nothing, right? Well no, we are just missing one tiny little bit to get them working. Can you guess what? Yep, a license. That's right, Microsoft coded in a check at startup to prevent those games from being run on Windows systems older than Vista (they could have probably run just fine even on Windows XP).

There are two ways to bypass this check, one of them is to patch the executables directly (a single byte change in each), but that one is of dubious legality and there is a more elegant solution anyway.

Since both games rely on SLC.DLL API function SLGetWindowsInformationDWORD to check for enablement, and since they don't have a manifest that forces loading of SLC.DLL from C:\Windows\System32 folder, we can simply drop a replacement SLC.DLL which will always pass this enablement check into the game folder.

That's it, now you can finally play those old games which you enjoyed so much without having to install Windows 7 on some old PC or spin up a virtual machine just for that.