I have Windows 7 32-bit running as a VirtualBox guest, and it seems most games are having problems loading.

The games I'm referring to aren't necessarily high-demand games by todays day and age; there's no reason I shouldn't be able to run Dungeon Keeper II, Thief or Carmageddon II from within a VirtualBox guest. I even tried POD, but to no avail. So far the only luck I've had has been Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, and let's face it, there's only so long you can play any one game for, especially that game.

I've tried patching those that have patches, installing DX8 drivers (Windows 7 comes with DX11 preinstalled, by the way), and installing Visual C++ 2008 runtime drivers.

Red Faction has a nasty bug in your version where the submarine explodes on impact with the water due to a race condition, for example. I applied the Pure Faction patch which allows me to play with the submarine as intended (among many other patches), however even with that patch I still see "CreateDevice failed. Please make sure you have DirectX8 installed correctly."

Other games just crash entirely, for example I see a blank screen and hear audio in Thief, and the patches (cam_ext or otherwise) don't work. Thief III doesn't draw anything on the screen; I have to press combinations of ALT+F4 and ALT+TAB to get my mouse/system stability back... as with most games, really.

This problem seems fairly global for GOG games. Are there any guides to getting these games working in VirtualBox guests?

Isn't it just because of the emulated video card instead of the GOG games?

Have you enabled 3D Acceleration in the guest settings and installed Guest Additions after doing so? I think it has to install a special driver once that setting is enabled.

I personally haven't ever had much luck gaming in Virtualbox but I haven't tried in years.

Alpha Centauri is a 2D game, the others are 3D. It seems pretty obvious that, like MikeMaximus has suggested, it's about the 3D acceleration. Admittedly I haven't had much luck with the hardware acceleration in VirtualBox myself and games never recognize the drivers even though I've set everything up in accordance with the guides out there. I'm running XP in VirtualBox and that one states that a GeForce is installed but sadly the games don't agree.

Anyway, have you followed all the steps provided in a guide like this one? And note that the 3D acceleration of VirtualBox is officially in an experimental state to this day so even if you do everything correctly you may encounter all sorts of issues.

> Isn't it just because of the emulated video card instead of the GOG games?

I suppose it could be, however as I mentioned earlier I see no reason why VirtualBox can't play Thief on my dual-core processor.

> Have you enabled 3D Acceleration in the guest settings and installed Guest Additions after doing so? I think it has to install a special driver once that setting is enabled.

Yes. There are two forms of guest additions; one requires safe mode to install because it replaces DirectX modules. I have tried them both, with varying degrees of failure.

Can you recommend any free virtualisation software that might actually play these games?
Alternatively, if you could recommend a procedure for playing the games in non-administrative mode, since it doesn't seem to make sense that Red Faction, which didn't require administrative privileges when I had the CDs, now does...

You can try VMWare Player (Free). Evidently they've always had much better 3D support than Virtual Box. I don't have any first hand experience for you though, all I use VMs for these days is servers.

http://www.vmware.com/go/downloadplayer/

Normally you just have to right click the executable or shortcut, go to the tab with the compatibility settings and uncheck "Run as administrator".

The executables aren't altered, GOG just adds registry keys that make the games run as administrator by default. If for some reason the method described above doesn't work (although I think it should) you can manually remove that key by running regedit and browsing to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers. All programs with any compatibility settings applied to them should be listed there.

Note that there's a reason why GOG applies those compatibility settings. They may not be necessary depending on where you have installed the game but there's still a chance that the game needs them for something important.

It's been ages since I've tried it but you could get a 3rd party graphics driver that worked with virtual box. I think one was Univbe.

Take a look at this, there's a few games listed. Unfortunately, it's a tiny list. http://virtualbox-gaming.wikia.com/wiki/Virtualbox-gaming_Wiki

Oh, that can of worms. I used to fix the issue by setting affinity under task manager - thief.exe to one processor instead of 2 or more.

I had to do that with Sanitarium. I had to set affinity to one core and then prevent every other process from using that core otherwise it would hang in really bad ways.

It may be that those older games are designed to run on only one CPU core, while modern machines have several cores. Maybe changing the games' Affinity (to use only one Core) from Task Manager will help.

In plebby's case, though, they could simply set VirtualBox to only advertise a single CPU core to the guest.

EDIT: Actually, that's probably what it's set to to begin with, so that might not be the problem. Either way, see the attached screenshot of the settings for one of my VirtualBox guests.

I used to fix the issue by setting affinity under task manager - thief.exe to one processor instead of 2 or more