Monkey Solitaire Small

Monkey Solitaire Small is a redistribution of the small (256-color, 2.5 MB RAM) build of Freeverse Software's Burning Monkey Solitaire, a wacky Klondike card game with a simian cinema theme. It is the same low-spec build also catalogued as 'Burning Monkey Solitair Sm', renamed for the Info-Mac listing.

What it actually is

Despite the slightly different filename, this archive entry contains the same Freeverse press release and binary as the small build of Burning Monkey Solitaire v1.0. It is not Burning Monkey Solitaire II (which added Canfield, FreeCell, Pyramid, and 52 Pick-Up); it is the original BMS Klondike build trimmed for older Macs.

Why two near-identical entries?

Freeverse and Info-Mac uploaders distributed the small variant under more than one filename over the years (e.g. 'BMSolitaire_SMALL.hqx' and 'monkey-solitaire-small.hqx'). Both routes point at the same downscaled Klondike build, so the catalog ends up with two near-duplicate nodes. Treat this as a mirror of the same release.

Gameplay

The core game is plain Klondike solitaire, dressed up with a monkey-cinema theme, multiple decks of cards, an extensive cheat menu, and the option to mute the monkey sounds for quieter sessions. The scoring and rules are standard; the personality is all in the presentation.

System requirements

The 'Small' build targets Macs with as little as 2.5 MB of free RAM and a 256-color display. That made it usable on contemporary 68k Macs and on Power Macs running in low color depth, where the 'Large' build's thousands-of-colors art would have been unplayable or simply refused to launch.

If you have a choice

If your Mac (or emulator) can manage thousands of colors and a few extra megabytes of RAM, the 'Large' Burning Monkey Solitaire build looks better and is the one Freeverse recommended. The 'Small' build (this entry) exists for hardware that cannot meet those requirements, and is functionally identical at the rules level.