Only Vmware 6.5\Vmware Player support Direct3D
VirtualBox supports OpenGL.

That's it for virtualization solutions that support 3D Acceleration on PC.

The number of cores and the amount of memory you have in your computer has nothing to do with compatibility. At worse you'd have to set the affinity for your games and that's it.

The above solutions ONLY support acceleration for Windows XP guests and above.

Also the Direct3D/OGL support isn't complete so not all games that would work fine on the host will work fine on the guest.

Why don't you post the games (and the ERRORS you receive when running them)that are not working here?

I find that on my dual core system several installers don't open. I get the hourglass and it's listed as an active process but no window for it. So to install these games I have to restart in safe mode. I haven't encountered any problem playing them though.

Is it too difficult to have Linux guest acceleration under a windows host?? All i see so far in virtualized 3d acceleration in virtualizers is when both the host and the guest are the same system (windows - windows, linux - linux) which to me seems pretty pointless.

OK, good stuff, thanks for the replies, let's start off with the more common problem. The older games that DO run, many seem to encounter a similar problem. We're talking about some racing games, warcraft2, starcraft, descent II and III. It seems like only one core will run, which is normal considering they don't support multi-core... but what I don't find normal is how they will run slowly and the first core will be at 100%. Some a little choppy while others extremely slow.

The games that do support multi-core like, need for speed 5, undergorund, underground 2, warcraft III etc, run PERFECTLY or near it.

Is it normal that a single core may have issues running old games?

ok, got that problem resolved, forget it. I had the processor in EPU mode at max power saving. This must of caused issues. The old games that are running are now producing anywhere between 80 - 300 frames/second. Yeah! one problem fixed!

Ok, so now, for one of the games that won't work... The need for speed IIse will install properly and will have no issues with the installer. BUT, when I decide to make it run, it simply will not start. I'll see the hourglass come on for a few seconds and it'll die off and nothing happens. I tried re-installing multiple times and also tried using the microsoft compatibility tool to reduce the memory. But nothing. Any ideas? Thanks!

Check the task manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del). If it's shown running then it's the same problem I mentioned. So far I haven't found a way to launch a program on a single core. Just confine it to one after it's already running which won't work in this case since you can't switch to it either.

Windows 95 compatibilty mode *should* set affinity to a single core.
You can also download the Application Compatibility Toolkit and just apply affinity if you don't want to apply the other fixes that come bundled with 95 compatibility mode.

I believe you can set affinity with imagecfg but I've never tried it:
http://forums.speedguide.net/showthread.php?t=187768

I won't be testing games on an i7 until the end of this year so I can't really be of much help.

win98, winme, win95 all set it to 1 core since none of them support multiple physical processors or even hyper threading.

I've used imagecfg before. It works. Only a few apps need to have affinity forced though. In fact, the only one I've had to do it for is System Shock 2...