How to run a discontinued videogame on a Windows XP virtual machine? - virtual-machine

My friend and I have downloaded some discountinued videogames from Old Games Download - Retrogaming and Abandonware (which I warmly recommend to any CD-ROM aficionado!). We managed to run two of them after downloading them, mounting their .ISO file and installing them on a Windows 10 machine. The process was fairly smooth.
We are struggling to run the other two. They’re only compatible with Windows XP, so we created a virtual box with XP as the OS, but still no luck. We can’t get the virtual box to connect to Wi-Fi in any way, even after following several tutorials found online. We have tried mounting the games’s ISOs in the following ways:
Using Virtual Clone Drive
Using WinCDEmu
Using Win XP Virtual CD Control Panel
And we think we have managed to actually mount the ISO and install the programme on the virtual machine, but the game won’t start anyway. When we try to run it, this window opens:
Monsters & Co CDROM initial window, with title, play button, exit button
But when we click ‘play’ nothing happens. We have checked the “Insert Guest Addition CD Image” setting that triggers Autoplay and it seems to be up and running. What can we try next?

VirtualBox access internet by connecting to your real machine (the host machine) as if it was a router of some kind. There is no need to make the virtual machine (guest machine) use your wifi adapter directly to get internet connection, just add a virtual network adapter to your guest machine and VirtualBox takes care of everything else (but make sure you have checked the appropriated options during installation process so drivers are installed in your host machine).
Now, the game not launching is hard to say, as we don't have any message or other info about what is causing the falling. Yet, this is a 3D game and VirtualBox is not good enough to hand this kind of computation.

Related

Can I run one WSL2 virtual machine instance on two system?

I'm new to the WSL2 and wondering if it's possible to run the same WSL2 ubuntu instance on both my desktop and laptop.
Now I am able to use wsl --export and wsl --import method to save and load the system to/from my portable hard drive. But these methods takes a long time.
I notice that wsl --import load a file named ext4.vhdx. Is there a way to load straightly from this file?
Update v2.0:
I was able to get a workaround and it works great.
Thanks to Booting from vhdx here, I was able to load straightly from my vhdx file on my portable hard disk. Windows track down its subsystem with regedit, So we can write our own(p.s: make sure to get BasePath right, it starts with "\\\\?", or you will not be able to access the subsystem' filesystem on your host system.):
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_USERS\【your SID here】\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Lxss\{【UUID here】}]
"State"=dword:00000001
"DistributionName"="distribution name"
"Version"=dword:00000002
"BasePath"="vhdx folder path" 【 e.g. "\\\\?\\E:\\S061\\WSL\\ubuntu-20"】
"Flags"=dword:0000000f
"DefaultUid"=dword:000003e8
I suppose the best way to do this would be to store ext4.vhd on a network storage device accessible to both devices.
I have previosly mentioned how to move ext4.vhd. You can check that out here
Basically you need to export from one machine and import it while making sure the vhd file is configured for wsl to access from the network storage
Since this should *officially* not supported expect some performance hits
Another way would be to run WSL on one computer and ssh/remote desktop to it from another device on the network
I'm of the strong belief that sharing the same ext4 vhd between two VM's simultaneously would be a bad idea. See this and this Unix & Linux StackExchange, including the part about ...
note that sharing LVs/partitions on a single disk between the servers at the same time is NOT very safe. You should only access whole disks from any of the servers at one time.
However, as dopewind's answer mentioned, you can access the WSL instance on one computer (probably the desktop) from another (e.g. the laptop). There are several techniques you can use:
If you have Windows 10 Professional or Enterprise on one of the computers, you can enable Remote Desktop, which allows you to access pretty much everything on one computer from another. RDP ("Remote Desktop Protocol") even works from other devices such as an iPad or Android tablet (or even a phone, although that's a bit of a small screen for a "desktop"). That said, there are better, more idiomatic solutions for WSL ...
You could enable SSH server on the Windows 10 computer with the WSL instance (instructions). This may sound counterintuitive to some people, since Linux itself running in the WSL instance also includes an SSH server (by default). But by SSH'ing from (for example) your laptop into your desktop's Windows 10, you can then launch any WSL instance you have installed (if you choose to install more than one) via wsl -d <distroName>. You also avoid a lot of the network unpleasantness in the next option ...
You could, as mentioned above, enable SSH on the WSL instance (usually something like sudo service ssh start) and then ssh directly into it. However, note that WSL2 instances are NAT'd, so there's a whole lot more hackery that you have to do to get access to the network interface. There's a whole huge thread on the WSL Github about it. Personally, I'd recommend the "Windows SSH Server" option mentioned about to start out with, then you can worry about direct SSH access later if you need it.
Side note: Even though I have SSH enabled on my WSL instances, I still use Windows SSH to proxy to them, to avoid these networking issues.

Can't connect hyper-v VM to via Virtual Switch

On my computer, I created a Hyper-V VM and virtual switch from the Microsoft documentation using all the defaults a few months ago, everything was fine, I could see the real computer in the Network list and connect to the Internet. I tried adding a second VM using the same virtual switch and now the original VM won't connect. I've removed the second VM, uninstalled and reinstalled Hyper-V, deleted all the VMs and virtual switches and started again, all with no luck.
The closest I've got to it working again is ticking "Enable virtual LAN identification for management operating systems" under the virtual switch which lets the VM see the real computer in the Network list, but the real computers network connection no longer works. I untick the box and the network connection comes back and the real computer is removed from the Network list.
When I uninstalled Hyper-V and reinstalled, the VM was in the list, so I don't know if there are some settings that don't get removed on uninstall, I ran CCleaner to try clearing it all out with no change.
Any ideas how to completely uninstall Hyper-V with all it's hidden settings and details or how to fix the virtual switch issues?

vmware workstation Player No internet connection

I'm using vmware workstation 14 Player, there is no option for Virtual Network Editor in VMPlayer. There are several sites which are saying to open the network editor. As I could not find network editor I'm using VM Player 14. Please view the screenshot for better understating.
Here you can see there is no option for network editor and when I click edit virtual machine setting I get the following Box
Here you can see I've selected NAT, but still internet is not working inside VMware. If anyone could help with this.
I was following this video but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2j3nyl4muQ
but here the person is usning VMware and not the vmware workstation player.
Inside preferences I see the following but nothing related to network settings etc
Inside my virtual machine which is a Windows Server 2012 the network adapter shows the following
To do what the video follows up is much better to do it in VirtualBox. Configuring your own NAT is quite easily done, whereas in new VmWare I still have not found a way to do it.
Check this to understand better how to do it.

Virtual Machine - Mouse/Keyboard events on Virtual Machine integrate with main machine

sorry for bad English. I have a virtual machine and there i installed a software that make some events.
But this events only happens on virtual machine.
Exist any possibility to this events works in my main machine? I mean, an integration between virtual machine and main machine, so when for example my software on virtual machine press "A" keyboard key, on MAIN machine also will happen a "A" press keyboard key?
Thanks
Depending on what you are using VMware, VirtualBox, etc , you will need to install the appropriate software on the guest, so you can enable features like, bi-directional copy paste etc.
Once you have this set up you can look up in internet the exact configuration for your hypervisor.
For example here is a working solution for VirtualBox.
VMWare have notoriously bad documentation, also I couldn't find similar feature for the VMPlayer or the workstation. Here is a link to get you started
Hope the links are helpful .

WP8 emulator stopped working

Ok so I was working fine with the WP8 emulator but suddenly after going into Hyper-V manager it stopped working, didn't make any change and even deleted the virtual machine to be created again on debug but no luck
I have tried with the various emulator images but none of them seems to work anymore, event viewer shows no errors on Hyper-V.
What I have noticed is that the virtual machine starts in Hyper-V goes to Windows logo, then hangs for a few minutes in a black screen and turns off afterwards automatically, tried starting it without debuging, directly from hyper-v but nothing works, should I reinstall the SDK? seems to me this is not install related since it worked before
Thanks
Taken from the connect forums, I don't know if it will fix your problem:
I had issues with the emulator and tried several things, including the below solutions and on a few occasions couldn't figure out what the problem was so I restored a previous image since that was quick.
From Discussion "RTW - Can't debug - IP Address Issue"
Uninstall the SDK
Uninstall and reinstall the virtual switches using:
C:> netcfg –u vms_pp
C:> netcfg –c p –i vms_pp
Reboot
Reinstall the SDK
From Discussion "Emulator and wireless adapter issues"
Problem solved! Hyper-V uses same MAC address for guest VMs (virtual
machine) and Host. If the router configured to give the host always
same ip address it will conflict with the emulator. Solution - on the
router remove the host from known PCs and let it give you some new ip
address (not fixed). After you start the emulator it will get the
correct ip address from router. Router will show you two PCs (host and
vm) with the same MAC, but different ip addresses.
Remove the instances in Hyper-V, and then run XdeCleanup.