virtualbox.org

They will pick it up and reply to this one if anyone has any more they can contribute. Duplicating posts is frowned on.

If anyone else can help, here's the situation:

I am new to the world of macs. My school issued my a macbook pro running on os x mountain lion. I have a copy of Empires: Dawn of the Modern World (a game produced by stainless steel studios in 2003) which I wanted to run on my mac. So, I downloaded virtual box and installed windows xp. Virtual Box set up fine, and the game downloaded from cd easily. However, now virtual box wont run the game. The game will begin to run, and then stalls giving the following error message: "The procedure point DecodePointer could not be located in the dynamic link library Kernel32.dll." I have already enabled Passthrough and the 3D assistant download from the VM's safe mode. I know the disc works because I had a friend open it on his PC and the game worked flawlessly. I have no reason to believe the game will not run on XP either.
I would really appreciate it if somebody can help me out.

Thanks,
sb23

Passthrough has nothing to do with this latest problem, which is clearly a simple software problem of having the wrong DLLs installed. In fact IMHO you should have started a new thread for this, and that probably on an XP discussion site since this really has nothing to do with VirtualBox.

As to your problem, the documentation I've found says that DecodePointer() was introduced in XP SP2, hence the fact that you get this error message implies that you have an earlier version of Windows than that. Basically, make sure you are fully up to date with service packs and such.

sB23, as stated above the current issue is likely caused by the guest OS Windows XP not being up to date. Start the Windows update by launching Internet Explorer in the guest and clicking on the TOOLS entry in the menu, select WINDOWS UPDATE. Let it run, reboot and repeat till there are no more updates left.

Hello All,
I do not mean to seem rude by not responding to posts for the last few days but I have been spending my time updating XP and going through the Virtual Box and Windows XP users manuals trying to figure out why the game will not run. I am currently up to date with XP software and the game still will not run. When i begin the game, it enters a title screen and then promptly quits. It is an issue I have encountered before and was advised by perryg to install the 3D Drivers through safe mode to solve the problem. I believe I completed that task. I entered safe mode downloaded an application called "Direct 3D support (experimental)" to the destination folder of "Program Files/Oracle/Virtual Box Guest Additions." However, when I go back the Install Guest Additions in safe mode, the option to download the Direct 3D support is still an option to download. So, I fear three things: that I am failing to download the file entirely, that it is being downloaded to the wrong place, or it is not the application I was instructed to install in the first place. However, because Direct 3D Support is the only application I have the option of downloading, I don't know how it could be the wrong file.
Anyway, Thanks again for hanging with me. Let me know if anyone can enlighten me,
sb23

I'm not sure if you are simply using poor terminology, but you don't need to download guest additions into the guest. You simply install them, using the Device|Install Guest Additions... menu item, available when the VM is running. Do it in safe mode if you are installing DIrect3D support.

I have to say: there is no guarantee that you'll be able to get the game working acceptable (or at all) even if you do everything perfectly. Graphics based games tend to be quite finicky about graphics capabilities, timing, minimal latencies etc, all the things a VM is not good at. I somehow got the impression earlier that you had this same game working in the past, in a VirtualBox VM, otherwise I probably wouldn't have bothered spending time on this problem.