I realize that similar questions have been asked to death, but I can be very specific.
I have successfully created windows 10 VM’s, logged users in, and played games using OCTGN, however, our favorite game of all time, family and friends, is the 1999 classic “Age of Wonders”. Pulling this game up in VM’s (XP or 7) on my Dell R710 with dual X5650’s, the game is unplayable. Graphics stutter, mouse clicks are delayed, and the CPU controlled players take minutes to hours to make their moves, instead of seconds to minutes.
My real question is, when replacing this server with a system built around a much more modern AMD Ryzen 2700X, am I going to encounter these same issues?
TL;DR: Do I seriously need a GPU per user (not enough PCIe for that…), to play a game from 1999 on VM’s?
“Platform: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows 95, Windows NT”
Win7 and XP didn’t exist back then. Running a VM in compatibility mode for another OS to run a game might be a serious issue. Unfortunately natively running XP or even Win7 with new hardware may not be possible because of a lack of drivers, so dual booting might not be an option.
Running an old machine with a native Windows install would be your best chance at getting 100% compatibility. Running an older version of Windows in a VM would be another way to go about it. I think you can legally get evaluation versions for testing, so it would just take a little time to give it a test drive. One last option might be to try out GoG:
I’m really not sure how they packaged that particular game to it to work with Win10. In any event, you might be able to check out their help section or forums for clues to get it working. Assuming your host system is Win10. If you are running everything in VM’s and trying to use compatibility modes then it may be too many levels deep for it to function right, which means going with a guest VM of an originally supported OS.
Hopefully one of those ideas will help you out,. Good luck!
You also could try virtualbox with guest additions.
Couldnt get red alert 2 working on a win10 machine a while back and a winxp vm worked like a charm this way.
Thank you for your replies! I’m attempting to run the GoG version I bought, in these VM’s. When the hardware arrives, I’ll try both new and old versions as VM’s, and see if something results in a playable game without GPU’s.
Virtualbox headless, is another option I hadn’t thought of, I just assumed other Hypervisors would yield the same results.
Red Alert2 Running in the VM’s would be sexy too, all of our computers, and our remote friendscomputers, run either Linux or MacOS, so anything we want to play (it’s a short, old list), has to run in VM’s.