Ok, you have read a lot about the Win XP mode in Windows 7 and think that you will able to play that old game that you have that will not run on Vista (Yes, I do have a number of those old games sitting around. Railroad Tycoon anyone??)? Well you are wrong!!
First of all, the Win XP mode is aimed at businesses that run LOB (ie. Line of Business) applications that do not run on Vista. So this feature is available only in the Win 7 Professional and up version. (I think you don't even get it in Home Premium, you will have to go for Ultimate)
Why would the games not run on Win XP Mode? Well the answer is in the graphics card. Most games that came out during the XP days (which are the culprits) use DirectX and need a graphics card that supports DirectX. Microsoft Virtual PC and Win XP mode(which is based on the VPC core) do not emulate a graphics card that supports DirectX. From what I can gather they emulate a low end graphics card with 8 MB of video RAM (an S3 Trio 64 Video card with 8mb of video ram).
So if you want to really play those older games/apps that require DirectX support you have a couple of options:
1. If the app runs with compatibility set, you have a easy way out. This option rarely works with games though.
2. You can dual boot between Vista/Win7 and XP. I hate this option as I need to switch reboot my machine just to play a game for a couple of minutes.
3. Use a virtualization program that can emulate DirectX.
- Currently VMware officially supports this option in their Workstation product. I tested it out with the trial version and the supports seems quite good. Some of my games did work on, and a few crashed the VM. ( I do expect that as games are well know to use OS hacks and unsupported APIs for speed etc.). My only problem is that the product is quite costly at $189. Do I want to spend $189 to play a couple of games, even if I love them?? This is a product aimed at the business user and not the hobbyist and that is why it is so costly. It would be great if VMWare can come out with a hobbyist product.
- The other option I found was a open source/freeware product called VirtualBox from Sun. They currently have beta support for DirectX. The professional version is available for free for personal use and they also have a Open Source version which does not have some features like USB support etc. (You can find the differences here) Since the professional version is free for personal use, I went for that. Though the UI and the website is more open sourceish, the actual implementation of DirectX support seems very Robust. Actually, I think vBox runs the games better in my view.
VirtualBox has been running on my Win 7 Desktop for a couple of weeks with no problem.
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