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#11
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 am still addicted to Civilization 2. This game is very picky to install.
It will not run on Windows 10 or any other 64 bit OS.
So what I have done, is install Virtualbox (free). With Virtualbox I can access all my HDs CDs and USB drives.
I then install Windows XP into it (very easy to do). After starting XP, I can then install and play my game.
This also works great when running Linux as the host (I can also run lots of Win apps/games that will not run with Wine).
Good Luck
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.
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
Thank you for your help, I will try again and I also found a way to accommodate 32 bit apps.
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.
Thank you, I will look for the original install disk.
Len