virtualbox.org

First of all, hello everyone
I'm new in the community and never before have I used something like VirtualBox but considering that there are so many old games that just don't run in windows 8 I believe I'm gonna be using it a lot... but of course, everything is new to me so I might need some help.

I installed VB a couple of days ago on my search trying to find a solution on how to run Medieval Total War (the first one, quite old now) and so far I've managed to accomplish... a bit, but not enough. I installed Windows XP Service Pack 3, enabled both DirectDraw and Direct3D acceleration and also installed the VB pack that comes along Windows XP OS.
At least with this OS the game kind of tries to start... but doesn't, after the into screen shows up I get thrown back to the desktop every time. Up until yesterday it would show me an Error message "Unable to initialize Direct3D"... today it doesn't even display that message, I don't know why... but I am assuming it has the same issue. I haven't changed anything as far as I know.

Now I find myself in a dead end and I don't know what else to do, which is why I registered in this forum. Can anyone help me with this? I'd really appreciate it.

Please post a VM log file. With the VM fully shut down, right click it in GUI. Select "Show Log" and save "VBox.log" (ONLY) to a zip file. Attach the zip here.

mpack wrote:Please post a VM log file. With the VM fully shut down, right click it in GUI. Select "Show Log" and save "VBox.log" (ONLY) to a zip file. Attach the zip here.

Thanks! I haven't answered till today because I thought I had lost the thread or something, didn't know it required approval xD

I leave it here, thanks

Thanks for the log. I see the GAs have been installed, which is good. 3D acceleration is enabled too. Were the GAs installed in safe mode? This is necessary for an XP guest because of the system directx DLLs that need to be replaced, and the protections XP has to stop that happening.

Does DxDiag run successfully in the guest?

What version of DirectX does the game require?

p.s. I would increase guest RAM to 1536MB, your host can afford it.

You should reduce nCPUs to 1. Your host is dual core and so can not afford to give both to the VM.

mpack wrote:Thanks for the log. I see the GAs have been installed, which is good. 3D acceleration is enabled too. Were the GAs installed in safe mode? This is necessary for an XP guest because of the system directx DLLs that need to be replaced, and the protections XP has to stop that happening.

Does DxDiag run successfully in the guest?

What version of DirectX does the game require?

Yes, I installed and enabled everything in safe mode. Dxdiag runs in guest properly. Game requires directx 8.1

mpack wrote:p.s. I would increase guest RAM to 1536MB, your host can afford it.

You should reduce nCPUs to 1. Your host is dual core and so can not afford to give both to the VM.

Done both (if what u meant by "guest RAM" was to change motherboard settings, that is), still game doesn't run.

BTW, is it relevant that I haven't been able to activate the sesion yet? I don't really know how to enter the password correctly...

The VirtualBox manual only mentions supporting DirectX 8.0, not 8.1, but I have no idea if that is significant.

XP activation will make no difference to the game. However I did notice earlier that you seem to be using the IE6 test VM from MSDN. I would expect that XP install to be time limited and not allow activation: also MS could easily pull the plug on that activation at any time. A Microsoft forum could give you a more definitive information.

I don't mind that much about the activation but how to fix the running of the game
Thanks for everything btw