Virtual PC 2007 - copying files on to it

[acrobat]

Anyone know anything about Virtual PC 2007?

I have it set up on my computer with Win98 installed on it. Win98 is up and running nicely. I've got a couple of old games I am wanting to play on it, and I can get the games installed. But there are some files I want to be able to get off my hard disk, onto the virtual PC's virtual hard disk, and I can't figure out how to do it..

It doesn't have a drive of its own, it just makes a virtual drive which is all contained within a .VHD file, and I can't seem to get anything in to it.

[Behemoth]

Are these ganes on CD at all ??

[stytagm]

If you've got a network, your host computer and the VPC should both be connected at the same time, so just put the games in a shared folder on the host box, the fire up the VPC and access them from there.

[acrobat]

Yeah, and one is on DVD. I can manage to install them from the disks because it has a working CD drive within the virtual Win98. But it's just C and D. So I could write stuff onto a CD and then do it that way, but I am assuming there is some other way of doing it.

The only other option I can see, is "capture an ISO image", but that's not too good because none of my stuff is in ISO format. I could convert to that, but again, I'm assuming there is some way I can just drag a file from my normal desktop, on to my virtual desktop.

It was hard to get going, because it installed with IE4! So I couldn't do windows updates, and I couldn't even get on the web to download winzip and stuff, because every web page displayed wrongly and had tons of script errors. I managed to find the IE6 download page on my normal PC though, and type that manually into the virtual PC's browser, and then I managed to click on what looked like a bunch of dots.. until I found the link to download IE6. So I can now use the web on it and get winzip and stuff, but if I could just put stuff on there from my normal PC, it would save hassle.


edit:
Ahhh, thank you stytagm. I did see that it could be networked, so I did wonder about doing that. I'll try that now but I'm not sure I can do it So if anyone knows another way of getting files across, please lemme know.

[acrobat]

I found some MS help page on it

Windows XP Newsgroups

Thanks all. Useful program this!!

[moogle]

cool, i've been wanting to play thief 1 and 2 for a while now. good thread/link acrobat.

[acrobat]

I think a lot of old stuff can still just work in XP, and if not, it usually works if you use the 95/98 compatibility option.

But I've got some games here that didn't work like that for me :/ One is Omikron Nomad Soul, and the other is Tex Murphy: Overseer.

They are both great games and I'd love to play them again, so this virtual PC is my only option really. I did try to install Win98 on a separate partition, but I couldn't seem to get it to boot properly, because I have a SATA DVD-RW drive, and I don't think it really recognised it properly... or something.

So I'm using this Virtual PC instead. It looks really promising. I have already tried one game and it worked but I need to install some media player drivers for it. But Omikron still won't work It starts and then crashes and says, "Direct x error : Unknown error"

I tried going up to Dx7 from the Dx6.1 which is installed with the game (and as standard in win98 I think), but that didn't help either. I might try Dx8 and then Dx9 too. I'm determined to play it =)

edit: Bleh ok.. neither work hehe. It's hard work this.

[directhex]

the emulated graphics card in vpc sucks, remember

[acrobat]

Yeah it does I'm not sure if thats my problem or not though. I might try with other Dx versions, and if that doesn't work, I think I am screwed. I could get an old IDE DVD/CD drive, but I don't know if I can be bothered doing that just for a couple of games.

edit: Wow I got one of them semi-working.

[this_is_gav]

I think you're screwed anyway using the virtual method. They just don't have any hardware accelerated abilities at all at the moment, and remember that's all DX is - a platform to provide hardware acceleration.

[directhex]

I think you're screwed anyway using the virtual method. They just don't have any hardware accelerated abilities at all at the moment, and remember that's all DX is - a platform to provide hardware acceleration.

quite the reverse - it's an api to provide lots of things. the components of directx include things like direct3d (3d acceleration API) and directdraw (2d acceleration API), but also things like directinput, which is hard to hardware accelerate really (can you imagine gamers buying hadware-accelerated keyboards with watercooling?)

[moogle]

I think you're screwed anyway using the virtual method. They just don't have any hardware accelerated abilities at all at the moment, and remember that's all DX is - a platform to provide hardware acceleration.

so i need to dual boot windows me if I want to play some old style games?

[acrobat]

Ahh well, I tried dx8 and 9, and neither worked. One game just didn't run, and the other game ran but with really strange things happening and I couldn't get the movies in the game to work, so it was pretty pointless. I don't think there is much else I can do, other than find an IDE disk drive and install WIN98 on another partition and see if that is any better.

so i need to dual boot windows me if I want to play some old style games?

It depends on the game. Many of them work in XP, including Thief 1 and 2. They require a bit of tweaking though, but they work perfectly after that. It all just requires some concentrated googling. Here is a start:
Thief Series: FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (Technical / Purchasing / Etc.) - TTLG Forums

[aidanjt]

The problem is exposing the real hardware to a virtual machine without it being able to nuke the host if something goes wrong, the other tricky bit is separating interrupts and I/O between the host and guests, and selectively choosing which hardware to expose, e.g. GPU, soundcard, keyboard etc are ok, but you generally don't want to give raw access to RAM and HDD. KVM is more advanced in this regard, but it's young, the userspace code is still heavily in development, and it's Linux only.

[aidanjt]

Ahh well, I tried dx8 and 9, and neither worked. One game just didn't run, and the other game ran but with really strange things happening and I couldn't get the movies in the game to work, so it was pretty pointless. I don't think there is much else I can do, other than find an IDE disk drive and install on another partition and see if that is any better.

I don't think any of the hypervisors emulate DX support on the fake video card.

[moogle]

Ahh well, I tried dx8 and 9, and neither worked. One game just didn't run, and the other game ran but with really strange things happening and I couldn't get the movies in the game to work, so it was pretty pointless. I don't think there is much else I can do, other than find an IDE disk drive and install WIN98 on another partition and see if that is any better.



It depends on the game. Many of them work in XP, including Thief 1 and 2. They require a bit of tweaking though, but they work perfectly after that. It all just requires some concentrated googling. Here is a start:
Thief Series: FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (Technical / Purchasing / Etc.) - TTLG Forums

yea acrobat, i've tried that too
still gives me problems.