I just tried it and it worked for me, except that the sound stuttered for any option other than Sound Blaster (even Sound Blaster 2.0 stuttered severely - bye bye stereo 🙁). Here is what I did:
- Ran the install program on the CD with VDMSound (used the right-click command without the note)
- Chose Install
- Installed to D:\throttle
- Selected Sound Blaster for sound and did auto-detect (it is IMPORTANT that it detects IRQ 7 and NOT IRQ 5, or else it will be trying to use Windows' sound emulation instead of VDMSound's - if it detects IRQ 5 then you might need to disable Windows' sound emulation)
- Made a VDMSound LaunchPad shortcut to D:\THROTTLE\THROTTLE.EXE. Didn't see any options that I needed to change from the default.
- Ran the game. Menu appeared
- Hit Play. Game started.
I noticed that low-level CD-ROM support was not required to get the game to run, nor was "enable basic VESA" (starting in full-screen). The game says it needs at least 8MB of RAM, but doesn't say if it should be XMS, EMS, or DPMI. LaunchPad defaults to 16mb XMS and 4MB EMS (for whatever reason), so you may want to bump up the EMS to 8MB or 16MB just to be safe.
I just had a thought: maybe your problem is that you're one of those people who can't get EMS at all? You might try making a batch file (like test.bat) that contains the following:
mem
pause
Save it, create a launchpad shortcut to it, then run the shortcut and see how much EMS it reports (you can paste the results here if you want).
Also, so you know: I have a GF2MX, WinXP SP1, and DX9.0a, so none of those three things can be the problem unless something really funky is going on.