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twetmore
Contributor
Contributor

Windows 98 and Interplay's Fallout Game

Greetings,

I have a MacBook laptop and am evaluating potential virtual machine software for running some older (some might say "classic") DOS/Windows games.

I downloaded the trial version of VMWare Fusion (version 1.1.3 as well as 2.0 Beta 1) and have problems with my very first experiment.

I installed Windows 98 (Second Edition) as the Guest OS and tried to install the game Fallout, from Interplay. When I run the installer, the virtual machine hangs with a black screen and will not install.

Windows 98 SE installs DirectX, version 6.1 (a?), which should be sufficient to run Fallout.

To investigate the problem, I ran the program "dxdiag" and ran the DirectDraw tests. As it turns out, the test which tries 640x480 (16 bit color) full-screen fails. I suspect this is also what the Fallout installer program is doing, but without the graceful error handling.

I have installed the VMWare Tools SVGA driver, and when I set my display properties, I see available color settings as: 16 color, 256 color and True Color (32-bit). So it appears that this driver is not capable of supporting 16-bit color at all. Is that true? Does anyone know of any sort of work-around for this problem?

I suspect that VMWare provides better (i.e. more robust/complete) support for Windows XP guests, but I do not have an extra XP license, so I wanted to try using Windows 98 instead (I have several copies of that).

Does anyone run old Windows 95/98 games in Fusion?

Thanks!

-Tony

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NorbertM
Contributor
Contributor

Dear Tony

As I figured out, VMware supports 16bit resolution in a windows 98 client only if you have configured 16 bit resulution in your host operation system (e.g. XP).

Normally you will have configured 32 resultion.

Kind regards,

Norbert

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