Windows XP On Virtualizers, A Quick Summary

 

Welcome To Windows XP. When I started the PC Chronological timeline project on YouTube, I wondered if I would have even made it this far. Alias, we made it, but man things are changing. When I started exploring the history of the evolution of the PC platform using emulation/virtualization, one could have gotten away with using either PCEM/86Box for the vast majority of the earlier PC configurations. Yet, as we enter the early 2000’s, it’s really not feasible to use PCEM/86Box, at least with later Windows anyway.


I was a high school student in the early 2000’s. At that time, I was taking computer maintenance at the high school that I attended. Most of the computers ran Windows 98. These machines were your basic builds with the standard white tower case, an Intel Pentium II processor running at 266MHz with 64MB’s of RAM. Yet, when the school district got order to upgrade all the computers to WinXP, even when they didn’t meet the system requirements, then I became cursed when occasionally using such machines. Has anyone ever used WinXP on a PC with a 266MHz Pentium II processor and 64MB’s of RAM? It was practically unusable.

Yet this is the experience that would be faithfully replicated on 86Box. Granted, I can assign more memory depending of the motherboard used. I think that the emulated motherboard using the Microsoft VPC BIOS can use up to 512MB’s of RAM. However, on my Ryzen 5 5500 host, 86Box will generally max out at around 233-266MHz, depending on the OS. Using WinXP on 86Box brought back painful memories.

The fact is that when it comes to WinXP in a virtual environment, you will have to use virtualization, plain and simple. Now in a virtualized environment, XP will fly on a Ryzen, even with a single core allocated to it. When revisiting XP in a virtual environment though, I made a few harsh discoveries. First, VirtualBox doesn’t support 3D acceleration in XP anymore. Now granted, support for 3D acceleration in XP was always experimental to begin with, and it was mostly hit-or-miss. (mostly miss).

However, it was a feature that generally worked with games that didn’t like VMware Player. However, now that the feature had been removed in VirtualBox 7.x, that leaves VMware Player as the only virtualized platform that supports a WinXP guest with 3D acceleration enabled.


When it comes to games, 86Box is perfect for PC games released between 1981-1997. However, 86Box isn’t just realistically feasible in running PC games post 1998. This isn’t too much of a surprise as 86Box is geared towards emulating PC’s that were manufactured up to the late 90’s. Virtualization will have to be used. The main saving grace of 86Box’s performance is that is cores become faster over time, 86Box in general will benefit as faster emulated processors can then be supported. I would love to rebuild my family PC as an emulated setup (AMD K6 running around 400MHz, 64MB’s of RAM, Cirrus Logic+Voodoo 2 combo, Win98) But until that is the case, 86Box will only be able to run those older PC games up to a point.

For things that aren’t games, VirtualBox though is very competent when it comes to running XP in a virtual environment. Video playback is much better in VirtualBox than compared to Vmware Player. However, Vmware Player can virtualize USB much better than VirtualBox can. My RCA USB video capture device was able to run under VMware Player, but again, video playback is much slower in VMware Player as compared to VirtualBox, whereas that same device wouldn’t work under the VirtualBox guest at all, even after successfully installing the USB drivers for the device. Because VMware Player supports 3D accelerations, there is a chance that an older 3D title will run under that virtual XP environment. When it comes to basic windows applications, you can alternative between the two as such applications will largely run the same, regardless of whatever virtualizer is used.

On the whole, Windows XP represents a transformative time in the history of PC computing. Whereas Windows 9x was intended for those who never ever used a computer before, XP was released as a product for those who already knew the basics of Windows and wanted to get even more out of there system. Multimedia was going from a novelty to the norm. WinXP came with WMP version 9. XP merged the technologies of NT with the ease of use of home Windows. Speaking of NT, I still don’t recommended using a virtual XP environment on the net. With that said, I highly would recommended using Legacy Update, which will install all the Service Packs and updates that were ever released for XP. It will install both XP Service Pack 2 and 3, along with the various updates that Microsoft has released over the years. Highly recommended. With that, I think I will wrap up this article here.

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