Comment by MrFoof | Hacker News Reader

Comment by MrFoof | Hacker News Reader

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I’ve simply installed Windows XP in a guest virtual machine (VMWare, Hyper-V) and that’s been that. Hyper-V will require a Professional version of Windows, but the VMWare Player (you don’t need Workstation) is free and will work just fine.

I play even Windows 3.1 games that require 16-bit libraries just fine. Nothing special. Install and go. Maybe a bit of ye olde config for really old DOS games where you had to set up a sound card in a separate config tool from the game :). Some games may require you to right-click on the executable, go to Properties, and set the Compatibility Mode to an older version of Windows. This is built into XP itself. Honestly, I think I only have 1 or 2 total games that have ever required it.

Been doing this forever (15 years?) on both Intel Macs and x86 desktops for as long as I can remember. Moreover, this isn’t just my old memories — literally played a Windows 3.1/95 game (came out in 1994) this weekend while watching Le Mans.

VMware also has the best¹ 3D acceleration, which allows playing 3D games for Windows XP, like Fallout 3.

¹ actually, the only, since Virtualbox's acceleration is broken and limited, even on v7

From the top of my head, virtio-gpu with KVM can also do acceleration. Not great support in Windows guests, though

A peer comment mentions GPU passthrough, that performs nicely but the setup is a burden.

Can share tips for anyone interested, this is a good start: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/QEMU/Guest_graphics_acceler...

I've run Windows XP under QEmu / KVM with GPU passthrough of an old nVidia NVS300 graphics card. Running an old nVidia driver, I had perfect 3D acceleration and HDMI sound. A good option if the OP has the right bits lying around, though not the most straightforward.

Fallout 3 from Steam seems to work fine on mine Win 11.

I run Fallout 3 on modern variants of Linux with Valve's Proton (a WINE fork) using "Heroic Game Launcher" (an Epic game store front-end) just fine as well. Because it's running fine in Proton, I assume if I owned the game on Steam, the same would hold true there for me as well.

I'd second that. I haven't had to deal with educational ish kids' games in a while, but I remember one of my daughter's favorites (something about crayola and castle creator?) already stopped working when I upgraded her from xp to win 7.

Wine may work for popular games (maybe try something like playonmac/playonlinux that can pull older wine versions for you if it has a recipe) but kids' games won't get a lot of attention. Not like Fallout 3.

Not by any chance "The Crayon Factory"? I played the heck out of that game when I was young. Good times!

I think it was this one:

https://www.amazon.com/CRAYOLA-3D-CASTLE-CREATOR-CD-ROM-Ages...

Might be available on abandonware sites.

Sounds reasonable... maybe Windows XP will work on VMWare Player... that's something I could try. Thank you.

I’ve been using VMWare exclusively for virtualization for old games, old dev environments, etc. forever. It’ll do what you need just fine. I think I started using VMWare when a story originally hit Slashdot 20+ years ago. I use kvm and xcp-ng mostly nowadays for professional work, but VMWare is tried and tested for Windows desktop use.

There’s really only two things you’ll run into:

* Games that rely on some esoteric third party library, that for whatever reason wasn’t included in the installer because it relied on a redistributable from Windows Update or the audio driver installer for the sound card. Rare, but happens. Almost always an audio library. Quick search will find it on abandonware sites. Think I’ve done this for 2-3 games ever, last one being Mordor: The Depths of Dejenol.

* Games that relied on early DirectDraw (not DirectX) and were released before Windows 2000, and used fade in/out effects. With how DirectX was changed under the hood for the NT 5.0 kernel in Windows 2000, it ends up being a slideshow. This isn’t a virtualization issue, but a Windows 2000 or later instead of Windows ME or prior issue — you’d see the same issue on 20-25 year old hardware (I did back then)! However this is super rare. I think the only game I have affected by this is the installer (not the game itself) for Dark Reign, which was an RTS by Relic.

It does, I still have some software applications that are developed in a Windows XP VM under VmWare Player (the VM is more than 10 years old!). It is also quite cheap if you need to do professional work with it.

Where does one get a trustworthy windows XP iso these days?

Does it matter if you're running it in a VM just to play games? In any case, mydigitallife is a trustworthy source. They provide checksums and you can also check elsewhere to verify if you calculate the checksum. I've done this and every ISO I downloaded through MDL was identical to the original ISOs. They used to just link to the originals on Microsoft's servers, but MS removed access to them years ago. So, thanks for that, MS. Moloch strikes again, I guess.

What a coincidence: I was literally doing this today.

I used this:

https://archive.org/details/WinXPProSP3x86

It was linked from one of those college subdomains; I’ll try editing that link in a few since it had a different serial

I think that is trustworthy, yes.

Given the phrase “For historical research or museum quality display“, licensing may be problematic, though. I wouldn’t know whether Microsoft cares about that.

Wherever you want, as long as SHA256 checks out.

Where to get the correct sha?

See my comment how to progress... register for https://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/microsoft-windows-x...

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