How to run a discontinued videogame on a Windows XP virtual machine?

Question

My friend and I have downloaded some discountinued videogames from Old Games Download - Retrogaming and Abandonware (which I warmly recommend to any CD-ROM aficionado!). We managed to run two of them after downloading them, mounting their .ISO file and installing them on a Windows 10 machine. The process was fairly smooth.

We are struggling to run the other two. They’re only compatible with Windows XP, so we created a virtual box with XP as the OS, but still no luck. We can’t get the virtual box to connect to Wi-Fi in any way, even after following several tutorials found online. We have tried mounting the games’s ISOs in the following ways:

• Using Virtual Clone Drive
• Using WinCDEmu
• Using Win XP Virtual CD Control Panel

And we think we have managed to actually mount the ISO and install the programme on the virtual machine, but the game won’t start anyway. When we try to run it, this window opens: Monsters & Co CDROM initial window, with title, play button, exit button

But when we click ‘play’ nothing happens. We have checked the “Insert Guest Addition CD Image” setting that triggers Autoplay and it seems to be up and running. What can we try next?

Answer 1

VirtualBox access internet by connecting to your real machine (the host machine) as if it was a router of some kind. There is no need to make the virtual machine (guest machine) use your wifi adapter directly to get internet connection, just add a virtual network adapter to your guest machine and VirtualBox takes care of everything else (but make sure you have checked the appropriated options during installation process so drivers are installed in your host machine).

Now, the game not launching is hard to say, as we don't have any message or other info about what is causing the falling. Yet, this is a 3D game and VirtualBox is not good enough to hand this kind of computation.