Good games never truly die because gamers simply won’t allow it. If there’s a game out there and it entertains in a way that a lot of people like, they will find a way to keep it alive.

The way most people play older games these days is via virtual PCs or emulators.

On the emulator side, a good example is DOSBox. Not only does that app play just about every good MS-DOS game that ever existed, there’s even a complete A-to-Z chart just in case you weren’t sure if a particular title would work or not.

On the virtual PC side, yes you can run those older titles, but it essentially all depends on your host hardware.

Why game with a virtual PC?

Windows XP is almost a decade old, and over the span of 10 years there have been thousands (possibly tens of thousands) of game titles released. Many of these games will only work in XP and not in Vista or 7. At that point you either have the choice of using a separate PC just for gaming purposes, or using a virtual PC with XP instead. Most opt for virtual because it’s just easier to deal with.

If you have good enough host hardware, you can run anything

Let’s say for the moment you have a high-end Core i5 quad-core CPU stocked 8GB RAM, a fast 1GB video card and at least 250GB free hard drive space at your disposal. This would easily allow you to "build" a virtual PC with XP utilizing 2 cores, 3GB RAM, 512MB video memory with full 3D acceleration and 200GB for the virtual hard drive. You could also run your virtual XP in full-screen easily with that kind of setup.

Basically put, if you have enough hardware grunt, you can put together an XP virtual machine that can run just about any game title even with the most demanding hardware requirements. For games that require the super-powerful stuff, those titles run natively on Windows Vista or 7 without the need for virtualization.

Things to note about running XP-only games in a virtual PC

You don’t need 64-bit XP

I know of no 64-bit-specific XP games, so building a 32-bit virtual XP is the way to go.

You don’t need to assign more than 3GB RAM

32-bit XP will only recognize 3.2GB (or 3.5 depending on who you talk to) of RAM. If you assign 4GB, you’ll never get the full use out of it so it’s not necessary. 3GB is basically the maximum XP can address so there’s no need to go over it.

Even with the best host hardware, games that require a lot of hardware may still perform slowly

Virtual computing is obviously not the same as using the actual hardware because you’re emulating an environment. With high-hardware- requirement games in virtual XP you’re literally testing the limits of virtualization technology at present. As such, some title may exhibit some ‘chop’. Expect it.

Virtual hard drives do need to be maintained just like real hard drives do

A virtual hard drive is one big honkin’ file. To maintain it properly, it should be periodically defragged within the virtual XP and the host operating system as well to ensure stability.

Pass-through devices may exhibit intermittent pausing

Two examples of this are USB game controllers and optical drives. A virtual PC can directly access these devices through the virtualization software to get to the actual hardware. The drawback is that you may encounter slight pausing because you are using real hardware ‘from the outside’, so to speak.

Remember, virtual PCs are transferable

The best thing about virtual PCs is that the virtual environment is always the same. This means that if in the future you switch to another computer, you can take along your virtual PCs right along with it, boot them up and they will be exactly as you left them.

If you build your virtual computer now (even if you don’t have super-fast hardware), it can be your virtual gaming computer that will last for many years because of its ability to be transferred easily from PC to PC.

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