Need help with running an older game

[tinpanalley]

I run a dual boot system Win10 and Win 7. I don't usually have problems installing an older game on the Windows 7 hdd and having it run fine. But this particular game, High Heat Baseball 2002 has a demo that installs fine, runs the menu, options screens, plays the menu music, but then freezes during the loading screen right before going to the actual gameplay. I've tried every compatibility mode. Since I'm on a system that shouldn't have problems playing this game and it doesn't need DOSBox, is it possible that the game could possibly not start because I installed to the Windows7 hdd while running Win10?

[dionkoffie]

Why do you have 7 and 10 as dualboot? It'd be much better to have Windows 10 as your main OS and run your games in a virtual machine. Create a VM with the OS the game runs fine on and play it on there. 

[Hekoki]

25 minutes ago, dionkoffie said:

Why do you have 7 and 10 as dualboot? It'd be much better to have Windows 10 as your main OS and run your games in a virtual machine. Create a VM with the OS the game runs fine on and play it on there. 

i'd agree, especially if you can pick up a copy of windows 10 pro so you can use Hyper-V rather than something like virtualbox

[tinpanalley]

Well, a) that's not what the question was about, sorry just don't want to get off topic
and b) I did try VM and couldn't find the combination of proper tutorials and people who could answer my questions to get it to work and when I finally did, several games wouldn't run.

Also, though it may be more common knowledge in the gaming world than in the regular power user PC world where VM is used for more "serious" applications, a lot of pre Windows-XP era games fail on VM due to DirectX and other graphics engine problems and actually won't run unless they detect actual Windows installations. I'm not an expert just saying what I've seen with my own eyes and read from people far more knowledgeable than me.
 

Anway, I reinstalled the game from within Windows 7 and that worked. Clearly I shouldn't have installed it from the Windows 10 install to the Win7 hdd.

[Mira Yurizaki]

Last time I tried for craps and laughs, I found out VirtualBox emulates a GeForce 6800 on a Windows XP VM. To verify this was actually working, I successfully ran Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory in SM3.0 shader mode. And it seemed to do it quite well.

 

Also I don't buy the "games won't run unless they detect actual Windows installations" reason. What makes an "actual Windows installation" an actual Windows installation? Game developers back then would have absolutely no reason to suspect their consumers would be running their games on a VM. And even then, why would it matter?

[LogicalDrm]

55 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Also I don't buy the "games won't run unless they detect actual Windows installations" reason. What makes an "actual Windows installation" an actual Windows installation? Game developers back then would have absolutely no reason to suspect their consumers would be running their games on a VM. And even then, why would it matter?

It would also suck for people who don't run Win OS at all, but play Win-made games with emulators such as WINE. Would be really odd decision from dev to create artificial block preventing use of anything else than single "real installed" OS. Unless, maybe, MS has paid big moneys to gain exclusive rights.

[Mira Yurizaki]

10 minutes ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

Unless, maybe, MS has paid big moneys to gain exclusive rights.

Even then it wouldn't matter. You just trap the system call on the check of what OS it's running and provide it the response it's looking for.