Teleportation

Beam me up Scotty!

It still sucks for DOS, but at least they're trying.

It sucks less for the Windows 2000 area though. Let's hope for better 9x support so the odd "1998-2005 games" problem gap gets even more closed.

DOS and Windows 9x gets 100% CPU cycles, because of lack of halt instructions. There are some programs for windows 9x that use halt as a "CPU cooler", thus getting host CPU usage lower. Can CPU usage be lowered in DOS/Windows 3.x?

Yep, DOSidle and other programs like it.

leileilol wrote:

It sucks less for the Windows 2000 area though. Let's hope for better 9x support so the odd "1998-2005 games" problem gap gets even more closed.

Yep, I'm waiting for a good Win9x emulator/virtualizer that can do Win9x with hardware 3D acceleration so that I can play problematic games like Jedi Knight and Deus Ex 2: Invisible War that don't behave properly on my modern systems.

HunterZ wrote:

leileilol wrote:

It sucks less for the Windows 2000 area though. Let's hope for better 9x support so the odd "1998-2005 games" problem gap gets even more closed.

Yep, I'm waiting for a good Win9x emulator/virtualizer that can do Win9x with hardware 3D acceleration so that I can play problematic games like Jedi Knight and Deus Ex 2: Invisible War that don't behave properly on my modern systems.

Me too, but problem is probably no one is looking into that. No one simply cares enough to bring good win9x emulation to play older windows games. All emulation companies work on are their business and "productivity" clients, those who want to run their old win xp weird strange closed apps on the latest windows.

temptingthelure wrote:

Me too, but problem is probably no one is looking into that. No one simply cares enough to bring good win9x emulation to play older windows games. All emulation companies work on are their business and "productivity" clients, those who want to run their old win xp weird strange closed apps on the latest windows.

I think the open-source projects like VirtualBox and DOSBox may get there eventually.

Anyone ever have 3d acceleration work for them? "Enable 3D Acceleration" is greyed out/not selectable in the settings for me, this with 64bit xp as host, 32 bit xp as guest, installing the guest additions in safe mode, ie. fulfilled the requirements and steps as far as I understand but no go.

I heard people were running WoW in OpenGL mode in the previous release, and that D3D mode may be available in 3.1.0. I'm not sure what guest and host OS they were using, though.

Edit: I'm pretty sure everyone is using WINE code, which seems to be some kind of D3D->OpenGL wrapper.

I haven't even gotten to the point of opengl vs d3d, 3d acceleration isn't being allowed to be selected at all in settings.

I've forced it by editing the config file directly at C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\.VirtualBox\Machines\<machine>\<machine>.xml

It's still greyed out/not settable from the GUI but at least it's going.

Tried enabling accelerated 2d video as well, it's not present in the config file, looked up the right variable name from source(accelerate2DVideo) and added it but it doesn't set, and is removed from the config by VB after running.

The performance is mostly good to decent, with what little I've tried working, but nothing is playable because the mouse handling is bad/needs fixing, it's coarse grain hyper sensitive response, move the mouse a hair and it goes from one side of the screen to the other, as well, when I ran counter strike, it had that problem plus once you moved it, it would auto move in the same direction on its own instead of following the mouse movement(stopping.) bork, bork, bork.

Mouse solution; after starting the vm, turn off mouse integration from the machine pulldown menu. There's a catch though, at least for counterstrike/steam, with it off there's no mouse cursor, so you you have to ping pong between on/off, on to select, off to play.

Yeah the mouse behavior you describe is pretty much the same with all VM's when you install the mouse additions.

HunterZ wrote:

temptingthelure wrote:

Me too, but problem is probably no one is looking into that. No one simply cares enough to bring good win9x emulation to play older windows games. All emulation companies work on are their business and "productivity" clients, those who want to run their old win xp weird strange closed apps on the latest windows.

I think the open-source projects like VirtualBox and DOSBox may get there eventually.

Well, I dont know the amount of old windows gamers who are buying VirtualBox licenses, maybe a more community-like effort would be necessary. BTW, what are some of those "1998-2005" games someone mentioned ? The only game from that era that doesnt work in current systems so far for me has been Sacrifice. That game just won't work on gfx cards that use Direct8.1 and up. And when it does work, it's glitchy. What games from 2003 and onwards don't work on current systems?

temptingthelure wrote:

HunterZ wrote:

temptingthelure wrote:

Me too, but problem is probably no one is looking into that. No one simply cares enough to bring good win9x emulation to play older windows games. All emulation companies work on are their business and "productivity" clients, those who want to run their old win xp weird strange closed apps on the latest windows.

I think the open-source projects like VirtualBox and DOSBox may get there eventually.

Well, I dont know the amount of old windows gamers who are buying VirtualBox licenses, maybe a more community-like effort would be necessary. BTW, what are some of those "1998-2005" games someone mentioned ? The only game from that era that doesnt work in current systems so far for me has been Sacrifice. That game just won't work on gfx cards that use Direct8.1 and up. And when it does work, it's glitchy. What games from 2003 and onwards don't work on current systems?

Some old Win9x games off the top of my head that I've had trouble with recently:

- Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (1997): Lots of issues running on modern graphics hardware and/or OSes.

- Baldur's Gate (1998) / Planescape: Torment (1999) / other first-gen Infinity Engine games: Graphics are corrupted on modern video hardware unless you use various workarounds to disable 2D hardware acceleration. I also had to disable UAC completely to install the official Planescape: Torment patch.

- Deus Ex 2: Invisible War (2003): Speed problems on modern CPUs and/or Windows versions (Vista/7), and some people have reported severe crashing and/or graphical issues. I haven't found a functional workaround (ironically there's a working speed fix for Deus Ex 1 though).

I think I remember seeing a fix come out for DF2 when was released on STEAM recently (it's an unofficial fix because people were pissed it wasn't fixed on STEAM).

ah, this might be it:
http://www.jkhub.net/

Haven't tried it since last time I tried Dark Forces 2 it worked fine for me. (That was on a crappy Intel chipset which are usually better for old games).

ih8registrations wrote:

Anyone ever have 3d acceleration work for them? "Enable 3D Acceleration" is greyed out/not selectable in the settings for me, this with 64bit xp as host, 32 bit xp as guest, installing the guest additions in safe mode, ie. fulfilled the requirements and steps as far as I understand but no go.

The enable 3d acceleration works for me, but I havent been able to run any hw 3d games with it under a linux guest system. All new games give unsupported ogl instruction errors, and the old ones that do run too slow to be playable.

HunterZ wrote:

Some old Win9x games off the top of my head that I've had trouble with recently: […]
Show full quote

Some old Win9x games off the top of my head that I've had trouble with recently:

- Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (1997): Lots of issues running on modern graphics hardware and/or OSes.

- Baldur's Gate (1998) / Planescape: Torment (1999) / other first-gen Infinity Engine games: Graphics are corrupted on modern video hardware unless you use various workarounds to disable 2D hardware acceleration. I also had to disable UAC completely to install the official Planescape: Torment patch.

- Deus Ex 2: Invisible War (2003): Speed problems on modern CPUs and/or Windows versions (Vista/7), and some people have reported severe crashing and/or graphical issues. I haven't found a functional workaround (ironically there's a working speed fix for Deus Ex 1 though).

Wow, it'd expect late last decade games to be the only ones with problems in modern systems. Although I havent had any problems installing or playing Planescape Torment in my p4 3ghz HT 6200geforce. Didnt know about Deus Ex 2 having problems too. Strange, being that's not such an old game. It''d be like a game released after ut2k4 or far cry having trouble running properly on today's computers. 😁

I think the windows Mech Warrior games have problems on modern systems too.

It still amazes me how compatible games still are. Every time I look at my list I'm amazed. Vista+ OS's have started to break things a little but we are still highly compatible with games today.

but yeah we definetly need a VM that supports D3D/OGL wrapped to the host for Windows 9x guests.