virtualbox.org

I built a Windows 98 guest machine on my Windows 10 laptop in order to play an old game I have called "Chaos: A Fantasy Adventure Game". It was working fine a week ago, then I didn't play for several days, and now I'm getting error messages both in the guest and host machines when I try and play. When I try to load the game, I get "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." in the guest machine, then that is followed by "The instruction at 0x0000* referenced memory at 0x0000*. The memory could not be written." in the host. Does anyone know how to fix either of these problems?

Please right-click the VM in the main Virtualbox window's VM list, choose Show Log.

Search the far left tab's log for this text:

Attempting fall back to NEM

If you find it, Hyper-V is enabled and needs to be disabled. See HMR3Init: Attempting fall back to NEM (Hyper-V is active).

If you don't find that text, save the far left tab's log, zip the log file, and post the zip file, using the forum's Upload Attachment tab.

Like this?

Yes, that was perfect.
OK, you don't have Hyper-V problems, good.

See our tutorial on setting up Windows 98: viewtopic.php?f=28&t=9918

One thought, 3D acceleration will probably not work in the VM since Windows 98 has no Guest Additions to load drivers for 3D in the VM.

Now when I try to load the game, the screen goes blue and says "A fatal exception OD has occurred"

If you have tried everything the tutorial has, it may be that this game is not compatible with Virtualbox's 'hardware' or the 3rd-party drivers. Virtualbox wasn't built for gaming.

What I don't get is why it suddenly stopped working after it was fine before.

That's a good point, I forgot about that. If the VM did not change, then something on the host changed. Antivirus update, hoist video driver update, Virtualbox update, etc.?

The VM crashes because it enables 3D acceleration - which is utterly pointless in a Win98 VM. No doubt the actual crash is caused by a hardening issue, but the fact remains is that enabling 3D in a Win98 VM makes as much sense as installing turbo boost switch on a Mini car. The engine simply doesn't support that feature, but that won't stop VirtualBox attempting to set up a VM for it.