No, there is currently no way to get hardware acceleration in a VM with Windows 98. The best shot for that sort of thing at this point is Win98 + DOSBox + Voodoo emulation, which is still a terrible, impractical, and wholly unsupported way of doing things.

I'm not sure about Windows 7, but Omikron apparently can be persuaded to work with XP, and you can get D3D support in XP in a virtual machine.

No, it won't happen. As Jorpho said, no virtual machine supports hardware acceleration inside a guest Windows 9x session. And there is no easy solution other than a legacy computer for those games with serious compatibility problems. Omikron: The Nomad Soul uses a 16-bit z-buffer, which modern graphics cards do not support anymore. And older graphics cards with 16-bit z-buffer support do not have drivers for modern operating systems anymore.

There may be some combination of a not too old, not too new graphics card and a specific driver version that falls just between both categories and allows to play the game without issues, but it's hard to tell whether a given combination will work or not. If I had to blindly choose one, I would say a Matrox G550 PCIe. It is a very similar card to Matrox G400, and this one had support for 16-bit z-buffer. Besides, it is probably one of the oldest graphics cards with Windows 7 x64 drivers. Other Matrox cards like G450/G550 PCI have at least Windows Vista drivers, that may or may not work in Windows 7.

Heck, even Piranha wouldn't run in VPC without stuttering all the time...

Omikron works fine on Intel graphics cards in Windows 7 64bit. (915/945 and Intel® 4500MHD Graphics Accelerator)

Probly not the latest integrated Intel HD tho.

Alot of older games work fine on Intel cards as opposed to Nvidia/ATI due to Intel not doing much to improve their graphics cards. (That's likely changed with Intel HD tho)

IIRC the 4500MHD is DX10 but only the latest 2nd gen Intel HD is a DX10.1 part.

Likely that Intel HD got rid of the 16 z-buffer but would have to test.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA

So find an old laptop with an Intel graphics card (or a new laptop with an Intel chipset older than Intel HD) and you should be good to go!

It's possible that the Voodoo patched being worked on for DOSBox would allow old D3D games like these to work. That's really our only option since no other VMs are ever going to bother with D3D support below D3D8.

The whole point of virtual machines is so you can execute code without worrying about some nasty virus hijacking your system. That you can run older OS's and software with them is more of a side benefit. If virtual machines started allowing direct access to more hardware than they already do, then the chances for malicious code being able to do damage greatly increases. That's why programs like Virtual PC emulate an S3 Trio video card (at least the last Mac version did) instead of accessing your physical video card directly. It sucks for gaming though because the emulated hardware usually isn't very high spec. It's typically just enough to be usable with no bells or whistles.

So when you use D3D hardware acceleration in XP running under VMware or Virtual PC, does the virtualized D3D hardware have the same limitations as the host hardware (such as the lack of a 16-bit Z-buffer) ?

sliderider wrote:

The whole point of virtual machines is so you can execute code without worrying about some nasty virus hijacking your system.

That's a nice side effect, but there are other ways to do that. I'll admit I'm a little unclear on the concept, but basically virtual machines were originally intended to allow multiple different servers to share the same hardware resources.

Jorpho wrote:

So when you use D3D hardware acceleration in XP running under VMware or Virtual PC, does the virtualized D3D hardware have the same limitations as the host hardware (such as the lack of a 16-bit Z-buffer) ?

sliderider wrote:

The whole point of virtual machines is so you can execute code without worrying about some nasty virus hijacking your system.

That's a nice side effect, but there are other ways to do that. I'll admit I'm a little unclear on the concept, but basically virtual machines were originally intended to allow multiple different servers to share the same hardware resources.

Don't really know what they were originally intended for, and to me this doesn't matter all too much anyway. It's "what can I do with it?" that matters to me.
It's a great way to test an OS without having to reinstall everytime you mess something up (just copy a virtual harddrive and it's all been reset 😁)

VirtualBox is a no-go for any win9x anyway, it doesn't even have SVGA support to begin with. win2k + wined3d is okay though

leileilol wrote:

win2k + wined3d is okay though

So WineD3D is good for something after all in its present state? I had been wondering about that. Are you saying you use that combination in VirtualBox?

wined3d is used by VirtualBox in it's additions. IIRC it wraps D3D8+ to OpenGL but only supports Windows 2000+.

Also is appears that wined3d development has stalled so who knows how long VirtualBox will support it 🙁

Jorpho wrote:

So when you use D3D hardware acceleration in XP running under VMware or Virtual PC, does the virtualized D3D hardware have the same limitations as the host hardware (such as the lack of a 16-bit Z-buffer) ?

sliderider wrote:

The whole point of virtual machines is so you can execute code without worrying about some nasty virus hijacking your system.

That's a nice side effect, but there are other ways to do that. I'll admit I'm a little unclear on the concept, but basically virtual machines were originally intended to allow multiple different servers to share the same hardware resources.

I only have the last version of Virtual PC for Macs which is VPC7 and under XP I can't run 3D games at all because, as I said, the emulated video card is only an S3 Trio which has no 3D acceleration. I get an error box that says "No 3D accelerator found" or something similar depending on the game. Whichever virtualizer you're using would have to emulate a video card with 3D acceleration or else have access to your real video card in order to run games that require a 3D accelerator. Go to device manager in your virtual machine and see what video card is shown under display devices. That will tell you what the virtual machine is using for video output.

Thanks for the replies, so far the best option that seems to have popped up came from leileilol, I'm sure Omikron would run in win 2k, most of these difficult to run games usually run in win 2k. I could try that, then win xp. Otherwise I'll go down stairs some time and see what I can make of the old bits of computer (if they still remain there)

So is wine3d already integrated into virtualbox or do I need to make some separate installs?

Install the virtualbox additions which include wined3d

sliderider wrote:

I only have the last version of Virtual PC for Macs which is VPC7 and under XP I can't run 3D games at all because, as I said, the emulated video card is only an S3 Trio which has no 3D acceleration. I get an error box that says "No 3D accelerator found" or something similar depending on the game. Whichever virtualizer you're using would have to emulate a video card with 3D acceleration or else have access to your real video card in order to run games that require a 3D accelerator. Go to device manager in your virtual machine and see what video card is shown under display devices. That will tell you what the virtual machine is using for video output.

Quite right, there is no D3D acceleration in Virtual PC. My bad; I thought I read about that somewhere. But it is most definitely in VMware, or at least in the Windows versions.