Video Card problem

[ferzle]

I want to play an old game (AXIS and Allies) on my Vista machine, but it will only play in full screen mode which is really irritating on a 23" monitor. So I installed VirtualBox with Windows 7 guest and installed the software. Unforutnately, I get the following error when I try to run it:

Code: Select all

 LIB_InitVideo: ERROR 0x887601b3
     Can't lock Primary Surface!

According to Windows, this is because the game is not supported on Windows XP:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/298212
But according to Axis and Allies message boards, the problem is video cards--specifically NVidia:
http://www.axisandallies.org/forums/ind ... .msg541385
There is a patch, and it works on my real Vista machine (and I have an ATI card anyway).
However, the game will not play on my virtual machine. The second link above seems to indicate it has something to do with locking a surface before drawing, which is what the error says (although I never got that error on my real machine--it would run but the graphics were all messed up. So the problem is not the real video card, but the virtual one (I think).

So, any ideas of how I can fix this? Or is the problem that the game wants to be full screen and somehow it realizes it isn't?

[stefan.becker]

Forget it. Some games work in a VM, the mostly not.

[ferzle]

I know for a fact that someone else has run Axis and Allies using VirtualBox, so it CAN be done.

I just tried with a Windows XP guest (the OS the other person who got it to work used) and I get the same error.

So the question is: Is it my hardware, the fact that my host system is Vista, or some settings that are wrong?

I have a quad core 64-bit CPU, and an ATI video card, if that matters. I can provide more details if it would help.

[ferzle]

Problem solved. Installing VBoxGuestAdditions does the trick. Not sure why, and not sure what it is, but it works.