Need SVGA for Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines

[beckster_man]

Hello all, I'm new to the forums and pretty new to VBox... hope I'm posting this in the right section.

I installed Win98 SE as a guest OS, mostly to play the good ol' games that are between Dos and XP and nearly impossible to get running on modern PCs. (Like Myst, yay!) Ok back on topic.. I just installed Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines, the requirements are as follows:

Intel Pentium 120MHz or equivalent
135MB of uncompressed hard drive space
16MB RAM (32MB RAM recommended)
1MB SVGA card, 4X CD Rom (8X recommended)
16bit sound card
Windows 95/98
DirectX 5.0

Obviously I made sure I have at least all of those, including directx... but the 1MB SVGA card is where I'm getting stuck. I downloaded the VESA drivers, and the VGA driver works great for other things, but I can't seem to install the SVGA one because it keeps conflicting with the primary display adapter.

So is there a way to get an SVGA driver that will work? I'd really like to play this game, and it plays too fast on faster computers.

[mpack]

I downloaded the VESA drivers, and the VGA driver works great for other things, but I can't seem to install the SVGA one because it keeps conflicting with the primary display adapter.

Perhaps my memory or my understanding is faulty, but I think you are barking up the wrong tree (several wrong trees in fact).

In this context SVGA is a video mode, not a card or a driver ("SVGA card" is shorthand for "SVGA capable graphics card).

The video mode is provided by VirtualBox, not by the VESA driver. All the VESA driver does is allow Windows to access the features of the graphics card emulated by VBox, because it happens to provide a VESA compatible control interface. Now the whole point of a VESA driver is to let you choose video modes, so talking about a "VGA version" or "SVGA version" of the VESA driver makes little sense to me.

Ok, we've established that SVGA refers to a video mode provided by VirtualBox, but which one? The term SVGA itself can be generic (SVGA = SuperVGA = "better than VGA"), but if not used in a generic sense then I think it usually meant 800x600x256. In fact I believe that is the video mode which the VBox virtual graphics card defaults to, so you shouldn't even have needed the VESA driver.

[beckster_man]

Pardon my lack of understanding of some of the hardware aspects... I'm more of a programmer

Thanks for the info... I'll try to state more clearly what's going on.

When running Win98 for the first time, you won't get any better than a 640x480 resolution with 16 colors. Not sure why, I believe it's something to do with the VBox graphics card. Anyway, when I downloaded the VESA drivers, I could use much higher resolutions with up to 32 bit colors. This has worked fine with many games I've tried so far, but with Commandos, the game runs very slow and is barely playable. I have every requirement that the game lists, I just was assuming it ran slow because of whatever "lack" of SVGA drivers that were compatible with VBox? Perhaps I'm wrong, but the fact still remains that Commandos, a game designed for 95/98, is running slow when I should match and exceed it's requirements.

Thanks for the slight enlightenment.. I should really know more about hardware and such, but I fail

Hehe.... barking up several wrong trees... hehe

[mpack]

This has worked fine with many games I've tried so far, but with Commandos, the game runs very slow and is barely playable.

I think it's more likely that the game runs slow because of the graphics card is being implemented in software and then virtualized as well, perhaps the exact way the card accesses video memory has an impact too. You would need Guest Additions to run it faster, and those are not available for Win98.

Have you tried running the game in Win98 compatibility mode in an XP VM? Guest Additions are available for XP, as is 3D and 2D video acceleration (if your host hardware and drivers supports it).

[beckster_man]

Thanks, I'll think about giving that a try! Haha, have to decide whether I want to use a few GB of HDD for an OS just for Commandos, haha.... of course, I suppose I might find other uses.. ah, anyway I'm rambling. Thanks again, if I try that I'll also try to remember to get back to this post

[beckster_man]

Ok, tried that... installed XP Pro as a guest, installed guest additions, tried running the game in compatibility mode... but now it's just weird. On the main menu, the graphics are updating quickly and everything looks ok, but VirtualBox is in an almost unresponsive state, I can't even click on the Machine and Devices buttons and the mouse won't move.. I can hit ALT+F4 then wait awhile and it might end the game, but that's about it.. I tried several different settings, enabled/disabled 3D and 2D acceleration, tried different processing options, etc, but it's always the same.

Oh well, seems this game just might not be able to run perfectly on anything but an original old system. My only other option, if I can't get this to work, is to download some sort of CPU limiter I think...

Oh well, I'll leave this thread alone for now unless I find a way to get it to work in a virtualbox guest. And I know this doesn't have anything to do with this forum, but does anyone know about those programs that limit the CPU so I can play games like that? I've never looked for one before.

Thanks for your help!