I want to download a virtual machine to play some pretty old games on my computer. It needs to be free, good quality, and trustworthy. Also it needs to work on non-administrator accounts, but that shouldn't be a problem. I have a Windows 7 machine and want to be able to play games from CD [possibly floppy to usb as well] that were designed for 95, 98 and 2000 comps. I don't know anything about virtual machines besides what they basically do, so a link to some info would be helpful as well. One big question I have is can a virtual machine utilize all of the actual computer's RAM? I just think it would be epic to play some random old game super fast because it was designed to work with 128mb of ram.

Just so you know, no items or links to items are to be posted which are under any sort of copyright. If they are, they will be removed.

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Just so you know, no items or links to items are to be posted which are under any sort of copyright. If they are, they will be removed.

Care to clarify?

I assume your intent is to avoid warez discussion, but what you've said includes pretty much every piece of software publicly available; even BSD/MIT licensed code is copyrighted.

 

Just refrain from posting anything which allows somebody to violate any copyright placed on something else, such as allowing an illegal copy of a game to be played, and definately refrain from posting links to downloads of items which would violate it's copyright. Just make sure it stay within the rules we apply on the VG&C forum.

Nah, I've got the CDs for all the games I'd like to play, just want something that will play them optimally, that's free and open source prolly.

 

@ the question about optimization: Some of my older games do work, they just don't work really well, so I wanted to go a different direction and try using a virtual machine. Some of them don't work at all though. [Lego Island, Lego Racers, Lego Alpha Team were all questionable, even on XP, so they don't work at all on 7. Lego Island 2 is whack because it was designed for 2000 but sucked on it, but the graphics on XP are too nice for it. etc etc.]

 

I looked at VirtualBox a little and it looks like it will do what I want; anyone have any experience with it or care to explain what it's about?

I've used it to run ubuntu and it's ace.

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Do I have to have the OS on a CD or whatnot to be able to install it? I believe I have a copy of 2000 lying around somewhere, but 98 is open source now isn't it?

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Or not open source, but free to use... Yeah it doesn't actually say that anywhere, but that's what my computer repair teacher thought... Meh I'll just dig out the 2000 disc.

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Yeah Microsoft is uhhh... Not that big on open source. To put it lightly.

 

I suppose you're using it already but I give another thumbs up for VirtualBox. I used to use VMWare Player, but I realized later that VirtualBox is really so much better and now I've switched. Not that I've been doing stuff with virtual machines lately.