How To Disable Flashing In Windows Freecell note: for XP

[Nabb 0]

Just a hack I've made in the past. I think I disabled the Game Over pop-up sometime as well, except I didn't write it down anywhere.

 

Disable Flashing in FreeCell

 

Windows FreeCell flashes the window whenever your available moves is equal to one. If you find the flashing annoying like me, this hack will banish it to the dark realms. (Wikipedia says Vista FreeCell doesn't flash the screen anymore!)

 

The guide:

 

We only need one download to get this working: Any generic hex editor (I'll use xvi32).

Download is here: http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

 

Boot up XVI32.exe, and open the file at location C:\WINDOWS\system32\freecell.exe.

 

Hit Ctrl-R for find and replace.

You want to search for 0F847B010000 (hex string)

This is to be replaced with 909090909090 (also hex string)

 

Save. (You can either replace the original freecell.exe or use Save As.. to create a copy.)

 

Play! The annoying flashing should be gone now!

If you want to revert the change at a later date, simply replace in the other direction (i.e. 9090... to 0F84...)

 

..how?

 

When we replace the hex string, we are replacing it with a bunch of NOPs (90 in hex). These are instructions to do nothing. We are simply overriding the conditional statement [jump to a flash screen routine if one move left] with [do nothing].

 

 

Thanks for reading, Nab.