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Breathing New Life Into Old DirectDraw Games
An anonymous reader writes "I bought a bunch of old Wing Commander games for Windows, but they use DirectDraw, which Microsoft has deprecated. They don't work too well under Windows 7, so I ended up reimplementing ddraw.dll using OpenGL to output the games' graphics. I wrote an article describing the process and all the fun workarounds I had to come up with, and released all related source code for others to hack on."
This isn't 2005. The concept of a VM software decently supporting old operating systems is long gone. They're now just a way of selling something to go with the "cloud" hype, a solution to a problem that shouldn't even exist were it not for awful security and installation policies on commodity operating systems: the need to run more than one instance of an operating system on a single piece of hardware.
Specifically, go on and try various VM solutions and see how many get you a working and stable Windows 98 install. And by "stable" I mean at least as stable as you'd get from good 10 year old hardware. Now what happens if the choice you've already made for all your other VMs doesn't support Windows 98? You going to install two vendor's solutions on the same box and run them simultaneously? Good luck with that.