TECH TALES
The joy of running a virtual machine with an older OS within your modern rig
Collecting old hardware isn’t just a hobby now. There’s an element of archivism to it; of gathering important historical documents that might otherwise end up in landfill. Image how many Voodoo 3s are out there in landfill right now, covered in nappies and Hello Fresh leftovers and being pecked at by seagulls. Imagine.
Here’s the thing, though: it’s a faff, isn’t it? All the eBay alerts. All the postage fees. All the forum-trawling, the tracking down of ol’ manuals, the hoping and praying that various disparate beige parts will sing together in harmony rather than – more likely – start a small electrical fire.
There’s an alternative to retro PC gaming the analogue way: just run a virtual machine inside your modern gaming rig. The benefits to this are numerous: no procession of fusty-smelling boxes arriving in the mail containing old PC parts you bought for slightly more than you’re happy about. Almost no financial outlay at all, in fact: only the cost of the operating system that you’ll install within that virtual machine, and which we definitely all always pay for. Like WinZip.
It’s also a big space-saver, of course. And while you’re losing out on the nostalgic bong hit of seeing a cluster of lovely off-white boxes amass in your home like a vein of pure gold on a rockface, for a lot of people who have to share their home with partners, children, housemates and miscellaneous other people who don’t bow in reverence to metal cases with ‘Pentium Inside’ stickers on them, that trade-off is completely worth it.
The downside: it’s not the simplest or most user-friendly process, and since you’re essentially trying to trick old games into thinking they’re running on hardware that isn’t physically present, you do run into compatibility issues.
THE TEMPTATION IS TO MAX OUT EVERY OPTION AND CREATE A MONSTER PC
Best of all the software options in this regard is VirtualBox, a free, open-source VM program for Windows-based systems. Installing VirtualBox is the easy bit. Setting up a new VM is a bit trickier – you’re essentially deciding how much of your actual, physical hardware’s resources to dedicate to running simulated versions of older legacy graphics cards, CPUs, RAM and storage. That’s a big ask.
The temptation is to max out every option and create a monster PC to run your old games on, but in practice this only causes problems. Those old games were designed at a time when nobody had more than, say, 16MB of RAM, so not only will allocating 128MB of it to your VM not help performance, it often completely confuses it and provokes crashes. Instead, it’s best to use VirtualBox’s suggested defaults, install your retro version of Windows, and observe the results.
The specs of your physical hardware matter here. Runnin
