I'm trying to get a virtual machine up and running to play some of my older games in. I know there's no drivers for Windows 98 drivers for a GeForce GTX 280 so does anyone know if there's anything else I can do to get it running.
It doesn't matter which GPU you have, VMWare emulates a DirectX 9 capable Video Card called "VMWare SVGA II", which right after a Windows 98 installation will be available by installing the 'VMWare tools' within Win98, which can be found on 'VMware Workstation's 'VM|Install VMWare tools' menu. If it doesn't install the video driver immediately (it happened to me several times) you will need to force the 'unsupported device' on 'device manager' to find the driver which will be located under 'C:\Program Files\VMware\Vmware tools\drivers\video'. Thus, VMWare emulated system will use the emulated GPU through your GeForce; therefore, no Nvidia Card/drivers will be recognized into the virtual machine. I can't tell you if it's good enough for games because I never installed any 3D game on my Win 98 virtual machine so far... P.S.: That's why if you install Vista or Win7 on a virtual machine, you will never get the 'Aero' feature working, unless you do a 'remote desktop' trick (google it to learn how). Hope to have helped! Cheers!
I installed the VMWare tools and have VMWare SVGA II but when I go the DirectX diagnostics tools it say I have no Direct3D Acceleration available. I guess I'll have to install a game and see what's up.
With Win 98 virtual machine powered off, check the display settings and enable Directx 9 acceleration. For me DirectDraw is accelerated, but Direct3D keeps giving me errors every time I test it and is disabled.
Virtual machines are not made for gaming purposes, so do not get youre hopes up. Maybe VMWare version 10 will have dx9 accelerated, if even then. You cant even get Aero working on Vista with vmware, that tells me how great the dx9 acceleration is?!
What does everyone suggest as being the best way to play early Windows games on modern hardware then? I'm guessing virtual machines with glide wrappers are not going to cut it.
I'm trying to play old Windows games. Some of them run on glide and early version of Direct X. None of them are DOS games, An examples of a game I'm looking to run is "Die Hard Trilogy". When I set the compatibility to Windows 95/98 it gives me an error about not working with 64-bit architecture. Three Dirty Dwarves is another.
Hm. I'd install Windows 98 on a separate partit-i-on and then use some modded drivers for the GTX280. Maybe use the latest official driver for 9x and then try to get it working with a modded inf in which your card is supported... Have a look here, also: http://www.msfn.org/board/NVidia-drivers-8269-t97140.html Besides that you need a Glide wrapper to get Glide without a 3dfx card working. http://dege.f-r-e-e-w-e-b.hu/ (take the - out) http://www.glidos.net/
Yeah, that's the best idea so far! I'm glad I still have my 1998 Compaq Presario with Pentium II 500Mhz and a Riva TNT 32MB GPU, which runs very well every game of that long forgotten era...