Running XP app in virtual machine

jimbo45 said:

The problem with most VM type of solutions is that the hardware is Para-Virtualised" which means you are running not physical hardware but "Virtualised" hardware from a "Virtualised bios". This makes it possible to run the same VM on quite different physical hardware.

Most Games often need to access the hardware directly -- especially the GPU or graphics drivers. On VMWare and Vbox that wont be a good mix for the graphics On HYPER-V or if using a Linux Host running KVM/QEMU (both these are HYPERVISORS which allow for a lot more options and flexibility) you can "pass thru" the hardware to the VM so it can use the native capability of the device -- but then that piece of hardware is dedicated to the VM and can't be used by other VM's or even the host. Also in order to do that there's often parameters in the physical machines bios that needs to be set such as possibly IOMMU or similar.

Unless you have modern hardware and two graphic adapters where you can dedicate one of them to the VM then serious gaming on a VM is going to be a disappointment even if the game runs at all.

Cheers
jimbo

Pong works well in any vm.

cereberus said:

Pong works well in any vm.

When I was a kid in the early 1960's my father bought a Pong game for us. That was long before home computers so it was simply all mechanical. Moving a paddle caused the light to move across the screen. That shows that neither a real computer or VM is needed to play a simple game like Pong.

MisterEd said:

When I was a kid in the early 1960's my father bought a Pong game for us. That was long before home computers so it was simply all mechanical. Moving a paddle caused the light to move across the screen. That shows that neither a real computer or VM is needed to play a simple game like Pong.

I was at an arcade with young step-grandkids a few years ago, and they loved it.

I have two old computer that run fine with Windows XP. However, sometime I want to play around with a Windows XP VM on my laptop with Windows 11. I have Hyper-V, VirtualBox and VMware Workstation Player. Currently I have a Windows XP Pro VM in Hyper-V.

Windows XP differs from later versions of Windows in that if you don't activate it within 30 days you can't log in until you do.

I just reinstalled Windows XP on my two computers last year. I had to call Microsoft support for help in completing the activation before the 30 days ran out. However, I don't have an extra Windows XP key for the VM so I had to use a workaround to activate it. Sure that is not technically legal but does anyone really think Microsoft really cares about anyone running XP. Besides, there is probably no place you could buy an Windows XP key anyways.

Mclancer said:

I just used my activation XP key from my old now unused Windows XP disk.
I have saved all my Keys just incase I could use them in the future.
I still have all my Windows and MSDOS "floppies", CD's, and DVD's.
Going all the way back to Win 3.0. lol

Most computers today don't have floppy or optical drives. That is not a problem for virtual machines because they can work with images of floppy disks and CDs.

I created images files for the DOS 6.22 and Windows FWG 3.11 floppy disks. For Windows 95, 98, XP, and later I created ISO files for the original CDs. When I create virtual machines I just mount appropriate the image files. Note some of these ISO files are not bootable so I also had to create additional bootable floppy image files.

I haven't had much trouble with the few old programs I use on Win10 that worked on Win7 but can't run 16-bit programs, actually can't even install them. I do have a copy of ClarisWorks 5 from the late '90s that runs as a Portable App, also DeltaCAD 3 and DeltaCAD 4.

As for installing, there can be issues using the install routine on CDs or in a downloaded file where running the actual setup.exe file works.

For reference purposes I have kept working computers running MS-DOS 6/Win3.1 Notebook, WinXP desktop, Win7 desktop and Win8.1 Notebook, all given me for salvage of parts but I fixed instead of throwing in the landfill.