Windows 2000 DCI Compliant Driver

[FriedTM]

Hello, I found an old program from my childhood however it requires both 256 colors and a dci compliant video driver. I have installed guest additions and set it to 256 but I cannot get past the dci bit. Is it possible to fool the program into thinking its a dci compliant system or to find drivers that would work with vb that are dci compliant? (image below)

Pic of problem

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[mpack]

I'm afraid not. Checking around, it looks like DCI never made it beyond Windows 95, after which DirectX provided the equivalent functionality, which places it long before the era supported by VirtualBox.

In particular, VirtualBox doesn't offer GAs for Win9x, so no way to get a DCI compatible interface that I know of. You can try running the game in Win95 compatibility mode (in Win2K), but I wouldn't count on that working.

Is it a 32bit game? Given that Win95 is when DCI ended, I wonder what OS your game originally targeted. E.g. if it was Win3 then perhaps one of the more targeted WinDOS emulators (e.g. DOSBox) might be suitable. That's not an endorsement: I don't know that it would work, but I guess it stands a chance.

[FriedTM]

I mean just that info is more than what I could find. As for the game I believe that I had it running on win 2000 back in the day but it might have been win 95. However that is a really good point and I might want to try it on a win 3.1 emulator. Both the os and game is 32 bit as far as I can tell. I appreciate the help!

[mpack]

If the game is 32bit then it won't run on Win3.x, which is a 16 bit shell over 16 bit DOS. If it's a 32bit app that targeted DCI then it definitely belongs to the Win95 era.

In fact with a bit of digging it seems that the game was released in 1993 then ported to Windows in 1995 and again in 1996, which confirms that it's the Win95 era. Is there a date on your CD?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_CD# ... ft_Windows

The article says that the 1996 release was for DirectX, but that the 1995 version was not - and was only ever bundled with PCs, it was never retail. I'm guessing that yours is a 1995 version bundled with a Win95 PC back in the day.

[socratis]

In fact with a bit of digging

A bit? A bit???
I don't know if you realize, but you just signed up for the upcoming season of "True Detective"!

[mpack]

To be honest I don't know why I bothered, as gaming lost it's allure for me a long time ago (I began to resent all that unproductive time). I think I was intrigued by the mention of DCI, an API which I confess I had never previously heard of, which surprised me since I've been programming the Windows API continuously since Win3 days (DOS before that) and normally was interested in any new interface features. My ignorance may be explained by the fact that DCI looks to have had a very short life, and presumably wasn't widespread either - never a standard platform.

If I'm right then this game was partly intended to show off the graphical capabilities of the PC it was bundled with. Also the force behind DCI was Intel, not Microsoft, which would explain why it had such as short life on platforms which Microsoft controlled.

[FriedTM]

I really appreciate the help as I would have never been able to get this working without it. Honestly this was just me trying to reconnect with an older piece of my childhood and I really did not expect much help at all. For future reference if anyone else encounters this problem I had to use VMWare (which I dont really like) to get a 32bit win 95 with dci and then install a soundblaster driver which I used img burn to convert to an image file. After that it installed and ran pic below.

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I cant state again how much I appreciate the help

[mpack]

Well done for getting it working!

I'm curious whether a Win95 VM in VirtualBox would have worked as well. Probably not worth testing.