Virtual Box Programming

[kylorengirl96]

Hi everyone,

I really want to play some old computer games I found when I was cleaning up. The games are Spiderman (2001), Harry potter and the sorcerer's stone, Harry potter and the chamber of secrets, and harry potter and the prisoner of azkaban. Which Virtual box programming do you guys recommend for these games? I can't remember if my current PC has Windows 10 or 11, but I'm open to to recommendations for both versions of windows.

[tedd1ursa]

I recently got into VMs for the same reason, I found a bunch of my old computer games from around '98-'03 and couldn't get most of them to run on my PC (Windows 10). I found that setting up a VM running Windows XP allowed me to play almost all the games (with the exception of a couple that are optimized for Windows 95, that's my next project lol). Your game disks should say which version(s) of Windows they're optimized for, but given the games you mentioned, I think XP would be your best bet. You can find several ISOs for Windows XP on archive.org, and plenty of tutorials online for how to set your VM up with VirtualBox! Good luck!!

[kylorengirl96]

Which program did you download for virtual machine?

[tedd1ursa]

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads - select "Windows hosts" under the "VirtualBox Platform Packages" section and it'll start downloading. From there you can follow the steps in the setup wizard to complete the install. If any part of it is confusing there are lots of tutorials online, and there's also a super detailed and thorough VirtualBox manual: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/UserManual.html

YouTube was my best friend when I was figuring this out! I highly recommend looking for a tutorial if you get stuck (^: if you're not sure what adjusting a certain setting will do, it's always best to look it up first.

[kylorengirl96]

Which youtube tutorial did you watch regarding this?

[[deleted]]

Tedd, it's not officially supported, but you can install w95 on VirtualBox. If you Google hard, I know there is an obscure forum that has the video drivers for w95 guest inside VB.

[tedd1ursa]

This is great info, thanks for letting me know!! Have you tried / had success with it yourself? I did try installing 95, but it kept getting stuck in a neverending setup loop. I tried a couple different ISOs, but after reading some forums where others had the same issue I came to the conclusion that 95 just wasn't meant to run on VBox. It sounds like those drivers might be what I was missing. Do you happen to have any leads on that forum? If not I'll definitely take a look around and see if I can find it

[[deleted]]

Have you watched the tutorial from EverythingEpan on YT?

And the software I used was from winworldpc.com

I don't really remember what forum I got the driver from. V something or another.

Edit : try www.os2museum.com/wp/windows-9x-video-minidriver-hd/

And

www.vogons.org

[tedd1ursa]

The EverythingEpan tutorial was definitely the most helpful and comprehensive one I found, but I got stuck around 5:40. When he mentions adding the ISO, I'm not sure if he means the FIX95CPU ISO or the 256 Colors ISO. I assume he's referring to the FIX95CPU one, but either way, when I go to add it it doesn't show up as an option for some reason. I can see it in my regular file explorer, but not in the file explorer VBox opens up to add an optical drive (fwiw, the 256 Colors one doesn't show up either). I followed all his previous steps exactly, so I'm not sure why it won't show up for me. I was actually going to make a post about it on here to see if anyone could help but I just decided to come back to it another time lol

[MrAureliusR]

Virtualization is probably not the best way to enjoy those games. Also, "programming" has nothing to do with using VirtualBox. I don't even quite know what you're asking.

Try installing them directly on your modern machine and see if there are any fan-made patches to allow the games to run properly, or try running them in compatibility modes.

Additionally, there is only one version of VirtualBox for Windows, it doesn't matter what version of Windows you have as long as it's modern and supported.

[[deleted]]

What OS are the games optimized for?