I tried today to play a very old game that is not on gog.com, Mageslayer to be precise. Awesome game! The game runs fine, unfortunately, I looks weird on a widescreen monitor and I can't force it to use D3D or run in a windowed mode. I was thinking about setting up a VM with windows 98 or something like that, but I have no idea where to start. Googling hasn't resulted in any satisfactory answer. DOSBox is not useful in this case because Mageslayer is a windows title.
Do you guys have any idea where I should start?
PS: I'm running an old P35/E8400/GTX470 machine if it is of any use..
you should pull out your old copy of windows 98 or get a copy from the internet and you your **VALID** key since you clearly saved yours from a long time ago and install windows to a USB drive or drive partition. Then boot it up from bios.
If you wish to go the VM route, download Oracle Virtual Box. Its the quickest and simplist to use. Other than that you either need a disk for windows 98 or an .ISO file of the install disk.
Getting older games to work in newer OS's can be done, but is usually a fath and leaves them buggy sometimes. To virtulise and run it in the OS it was designed for is the best option IMO.
How to emulate Windows 95/3.1/98 http://youtu.be/zFOy-M5v0rI
Windows 98 install using VirtualBox http://youtu.be/9313WJNiOUw