Which games do you want to play?

Virtualbox doesn't really support Win9x. There is no video driver for these OSs and so video performance is very poor. Alternative is running Windows XP in VirtualBox and seeing if your old Win95 game works in XP.

Wine (but it is a Linux program). Wine give good Windows compatibility, and you won't have problems running it on recent hardware.

swaaye wrote:

Which games do you want to play?

Virtualbox doesn't really support Win9x. There is no video driver for these OSs and so video performance is very poor. Alternative is running Windows XP in VirtualBox and seeing if your old Win95 game works in XP.

Yeah I know. I had to use an unofficial fix, something called Nucleus or something. It emulated SVGA 2.0 or something like that.
I mostly like to play Battle Beast and Gunman Chronicles. Emulating XP sounds like a better idea yeah.

PCem has been kicking all sorts of butt, you should try that one.
MESS has also come a long way.
In theory you can also do it on DOSBox, but it is unsupported.

Good tips Stiletto. I'll takea closer look in the morning. It's almost midnight here atm. 😀

Sorry for double post. But I borrowed my moms XP CD today and emulated the OS through VirtualBox. It ran as slow as Windows 95. However though, I had working drivers for VGA and Network.
Why is VirtualBox so slow? No matter how much memory I allocate to the Guest OS it still lags.

At first glance PCem appeared really neat. Then I lost track completely when I tried to emulate an 386.

Are you trying to use Direct3D or OpenGL? As far as I know there is still no VM which does hardware 3D adequately for old games.

You mean those two tickboxes that enables 3D runtime? No, I have those unticked.

VirtualBox will be a sluggishly slow speed if you don't have any CPU virtualization extensions.

personally I use VPC2007 for Win98SE (compiling stuff and curiously running EXES with an undo disk) and PCem for Windows95 (for games - Tseng ET4000AX driver is stable enough with dosboxes despite not natively supporting VESA).

VirtualBox sucks for 9x, but is great for emulating Windows XP guests though 😀

Right now the only emulators I know of that can run Win95 and have 3d acceleration are DOSBox-X/Yhkwong with 3dfx emulation (UNSUPPORTED BY THE WAY, EXPECT TRIAL AND ERROR AND PROBLEM SOLVING) and PCem with S3 ViRGE emulation.

That and for example Gunman Chronicles is based on Half Life and so is mainly a OpenGL/Direct3D game.....

This may get gunman working on win7 x64 (pretty sure it worked when I only had 4gb ram)
http://www.purebasic.fr/english/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=49819
or maybe amd ramdisk to limit memory

The link to the tool listed in that thread is dead.

How do I get full DirectX support for XP in VirtualBox? I tried to download the official DX install and ran it, but my games that needs DX won't run at all.
I also tried to install the experimentall D3D thing that comes with guest addon iso in VirtualBox, but to no avail.

Rod Primitive wrote:

How do I get full DirectX support for XP in VirtualBox? I tried to download the official DX install and ran it, but my games that needs DX won't run at all.
I also tried to install the experimentall D3D thing that comes with guest addon iso in VirtualBox, but to no avail.

- Go to your virtual machine options. Go to video and check enable 3D acceleration. Also, give a fair amount of VRAM to your VM (64 mb would be enough).
- Start your VM, but press F5 to start windows on safe mode.
- Install the guest additions on your VM enabling D3D. Note that you won't be able to install D3D support if Windows has started normally.

Once you've installed 3D support, note that it is not a "full" D3D support. It only supports DirectX 9 and OpenGL, so earlier games won't work as intended. If you start dxdiag and try to pass the video tests, only the third test will work. The first and second tests use older DirectX, so they will fail.

There were a D3D to OpenGL wrapper that maybe would make older games work, but I don't know if it really works.

Done all that. So you mean I'm screwed on the older games part then? Fuck...
I can't even play Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of The Earth. And if I recall, that game came out for Xbox first, so it has to be DX 9.

EDIT: Sorry no, DCoTE is DX 8.1...

You shouldn't even need to use a VM for these OpenGL and Direct3D games. They should work on modern Windows. Call of Cthulhu is sold on Steam and GOG so I'm sure it works.

Also, instead of messing with this half-baked D3D-in-a-VM stuff, you could dual boot real XP if you must.

swaaye wrote:

You shouldn't even need to use a VM for these OpenGL and Direct3D games. They should work on modern Windows. Call of Cthulhu is sold on Steam and GOG so I'm sure it works.

Also, instead of messing with this half-baked D3D-in-a-VM stuff, you could dual boot real XP if you must.

Call of Cthulhu is not sold on GOG and it does NOT run well on OS'es after XP. I have both the retail and Steam version and they both CTD in Windows 7 and 8/8.1

Rod Primitive wrote:

Call of Cthulhu is not sold on GOG and it does NOT run well on OS'es after XP. I have both the retail and Steam version and they both CTD in Windows 7 and 8/8.1

Oops it looks like I mistook a forum thread on gog.com for a store page. From the Steam forum it sounds like there are people playing it on 7 and 8.

By the way, you haven't bothered to tell us what hardware you are using.

Windows 8.1 Pro x64
i5 4670K
8GB DDR3
Geforce 770

All stock, nothing OC'd.