virtualbox.org

I am attempting to play Age of Empires 2 HD on a WinXP guest in VirtualBox. The game launches fine, but the screen is about 75% black space, with the actual game screen stuck in the lower right corner. I tried just about every combination of screen resolution in both the host and the guest. I even went to the extent of hooking up an old CRT monitor that I KNOW would display the game at full screen were it working properly. Even running 1024x768 on both the host and guest using the CRT, the game window only occupies 25% of the available space, always in the lower right corner. It will stretch and contort along either axis to make sure it remains in the lower right quadrant of the screen.

Does anyone have any idea why this is happening or how I can make it work properly? I have Guest Additions installed, and I have tried it both with and without 2D/3D graphics acceleration. I have tried both full screen mode and scaled mode to no avail. I have found posts from others where the game window is small, but it sounds like they're at least centered and at the games' native resolution, which is more understandable. I don't recall seeing anyone else where the game screen only occupies the lower right corner of the window. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Virtual machines will never be as powerful as the host, specially on the video side. Applications that have high requirements on the GPU (drawing, 3D, games) are expected to not work as good as on the real hardware.

socratis wrote:Virtual machines will never be as powerful as the host, specially on the video side. Applications that have high requirements on the GPU (drawing, 3D, games) are expected to not work as good as on the real hardware.

This would be true of contemporary games, certainly. This game is just a port/update of a 14 year old game that had minimal system requirements to begin with. Even considering the reduced resources allocated to the virtual machine, they probably exceed the most advanced system specs at the time of the game's release. Considering that others have successfully played Starcraft and similar such games on VMs, I don't think insufficient resources is the issue.

Your comment would be generally true, but (there's always a but) as I said, game designers use "special" tricks to maximize performance, including (but not limited to) actually targeting specific hardware features of a GPU. You'll find yourself looking at specs of a game and it works with GPU "Lala 6750" but not with GPU "Lala 6740".

I'll take a look at the requirements of "Age of Empires 2 HD" and post back.