When Strict Adherence to hardware standards renders a game completely unplayable - the story of FoxFire 13.
Written sometime in the early 1990s by Randy Rasa, better known for his "Solitaire Suite" line, FF13 is a DOS solitaire game of pairing cards that add up to 13, on a 4-column tableau. Cards are dealt to the tableau in fours, one to each column, and if there are empty columns, a single card may be moved to fill the blank.
Now, I don't have screenshots or footage of FoxFire 13. Randy Rasa's own website doesn't seem to acknowledge that it exists, when it even has copies of his oldest DOS solitaires. And I suspect the reason why that is, is because the game does not run on common hardware anymore.
FF13's system requirements are simple; it'll run on a 286 with an EGA card and a mouse. Problem is, it handles the mouse very strictly, in a way that even DOSBox is incompatible with.
Upon trying to start FF13 in DOSBox, it beeps out an error: "Mouse is not responding to hardware reset." DOSBox does, in fact, emulate a mouse, and loads its driver by default on startup.
So I switched to an 86box install, upon which I've loaded a set of basic essential drivers via the PhilsComputerLab starter disk. CuteMouse, the Oak Tech CD-ROM driver, and the pre-written MS-DOS boot menu setup. After figuring out how to splice the FF13 files into a floppy image, I run it again.
Same error.
Now, from past experience, I know that FoxFire13 *CAN* run in PCem/86box, but you must be running the official Microsoft Mouse drivers, off of their proprietary drivers disk. (The Readme also says a Logitech mouse is supported, but I did not try that.) CuteMouse does not support the low-level hardware reset that FF13 wants. I even confirmed this on my real 486, which *also* has CuteMouse installed for the sake of conventional memory savings.
It does at least have this fun little "Move Alert!" sign that flashes when there are available moves.
Checked over my PCem instances on my gaming rig. I had a 386 setup that does have FF13 for DOS installed.
This game is quite picky. If you have the wrong kind of video card, the text garbles because the BIOS font is at the wrong resolution.
FoxFire 13 can still be found to download via Discmaster - https://discmaster.textfiles.com/browse/9339/So%20Much%20Shareware%205%20(CD-ROM)%20(Power%20User%20Software)(1995).ISO/games/ff13d102.zip - you can download the zip file as originally distributed by finding the icon in the upper-right of the page.
It does also have a 16-bit Windows version at https://discmaster.textfiles.com/browse/814/Monster%20Media%20No.%2014%20(April%201996)%20(Monster%20Media,%20Inc.).ISO/win_game/ff13w103.zip - this is somewhat less picky to run, but loses some of the charm of the DOS version's primitive EGA GUI.