virtualbox.org

I am this close to ripping out my hair.

I am running Windows 2003 R2 on Mac OS X (El Captain, fully updated if it matters). I am trying to play Zoo Tycoon but I can't. I get a message telling me to install Direct X 8.0 or later. However, I can't for the life of me figure out how. Do I need to download the .exe and burn it to a disk to do this? I ran Guest Additions and enabled the 3D thingie, but still no avail. Help?

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, video) are expected to not work as good as on the real hardware, if they work at all.

If you run 'dxdiag.exe' you'll see that it includes a warning: "Several files (d3d8.dll, d3d9.dll) are old versions, which could cause problems. You should reinstall DirectX to get the latest version." That is the price that you pay when running on a Virtual Machine and not natively on the hardware.

In addition to vms not being the best place to run graphic-heavy games, a client OS is always better than a server OS for this sort of thing. Most servers do not even have high performance graphics cards (or the drivers for them).