Is there any way for Vista 64 to play 32 bit/16 bit games?

[isiolia]

Last but not least... You can always use a Virtual Machine. VirtualBox now has Direct3d support for hardware acceleration. You could install XP 32bit or whatever suits your fancy.

I think it's really lame not all versions of 7 actually support XP Mode, like Home Premium which is what I have.

The official "XP Mode" is pretty poor for games anyway though - third party virtual machines have much better support for things like Direct 3D (In the sense that they actually have support for it). It's entirely targeted at business apps.

[DinnerX]

Last but not least... You can always use a Virtual Machine. VirtualBox now has Direct3d support for hardware acceleration. You could install XP 32bit or whatever suits your fancy.

I vote for virtualbox too. It's great. I wouldn't go lower than XP for the guest windows install though. I don't think older versions of windows are supported by the virtualbox guest additions. I know for sure guest additions can't be installed on win98 in virtualbox and you really need them to get much good out of virtualbox for games.

[Xeogred]

Huh, so maybe I should check out VirtualBox then? One game that's been practically impossible to get working for me is the original Thief. I've done all the patches, widescreen mods, etc, and it even plays... for a few minutes until it crashes. Maybe I can get that working with VirtualBox or something, haven't heard of it before though.

[isiolia]

Virtualbox is a good thing to try first, as it's free. Comparable products would be Parallels Desktop or VMWare Workstation/Fusion (PC n' Mac respectively, Workstation costs a fair bit more though).

Haven't messed with the Thief games much though - Deadly Shadows had issues with multi-core CPUs that were bypassed easily enough. A quick Google search just seems to net the same things you've already tried.

[J T]

It looks like Virtual Box, or something like it, is likely going to be the way to go. I've never heard of it before, but it sounds like a good way to get around these kinds of issues. Is it pretty easy to use? Does it take up a lot of extra processing power?

[jeffro11]

Yes to both questions!

[isiolia]

It's no harder to use than any comparable software. Most of what you need to do is the installation/configuration of the guest OS.

VMs aren't as bad as emulators in terms of CPU requirement, since they're more managing access to resources than reinterpreting everything. Still can be RAM hungry (particularly), and you are running a second (or more) OS on top of it all.

[DinnerX]

After getting Virtualbox all setup it runs like a dream for me. I split the system resources evenly between the guest os inside virtualbox and the actual host os. Virtualbox seems to allow the guest os fairly direct hardware access after some configuring.

Be sure to enable IO APIC so you can use multiple cores in the VM. It makes everything run waaaaaay smoother. You will probably have to enable IO APIC in your bios. For me it wasn't exactly labeled as IO APIC in the bios. It just said something about virtual machines and was under the power category.

[Pulsar_t]

I used to have an XP VirtualBox VM but ditched it because accelerated video support is rubbish. Until a proper Wine-like interpreter/emulator for versions 4.00.950 through 5.1.2600 comes along I'm simply not going to bother with unsupported games.

[BoringSupreez]

I guess I should be glad I have 32 bit Vista on my PC, rather than 64 bit Vista. Is there even a benefit to 64 bit, or is it just a worthless feature?