The Old School Gamer's Bible of Sandbox Gaming

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So I am working on a project with the above title.

It basically is a guide dedicated to old school gamers like all of us that has the objective to guarantee total operating system freedom.
My goal is to enable anyone to play any game year 2000 and prior using virtualized sandbox environments.
Some people think this is trivial: it is not! I am able to run ANY game of the above release date range on non-Windows machines using Oracle Virtualbox only.
Other people think this is impossible and that, for example on GNU/Linux, Wine is the best choice: it is not! Wine is the better choice for some luckily more compatible (and newer) games. For oldies, a sandbox environment is the way.

For those who still don't believe me, well, I promise that I will demonstrate the contrary. I'm about 20% done (and posting this thread serves to motivate me so that I have someone, maybe, who awaits this guide with curiosity) and I'm describing the hows and the whys about which virtual machine settings are appropriate for specific types of games.
Non DirectX games require different settings than those who do use the library, and even among the latter, DirectDraw demands different settings than Direct3D....

I will explain all such matters in one single PDF document with screenshots. If I manage to find a legal escape I might publish an entire package with pre-configured appliances that just require to be copied on hard drive and loaded from Oracle Virtualbox.

I will not (at least in the first phase) deal with any other virtualization software.

I hope this might interest at least a few of you!
There are, to my knowledge. many people renouncing to alternative operating systems because of gaming: I want to solve this issue for older games at least so that those tempted might migrate to their OS of choice!

 

It is not trivial because even in the '90s, running old games could be a challenge. First, there is the issue of different platforms. Commodore 64/128, MS-DOS aka "IBM" and Apple II were the dominant gaming platforms in the '80s. By the early '90s Commodore and the Apple II were phased out.
However, the introduction of Windows 95 was a major architecture shift in computing, moving from 16-bit to 32-bit.
In addition, unlike Windows 3.1 which was basically an MS-DOS application, Windows 95 and later tried to be its own OS, and used different drivers.
Many systems failed to ship with 16-bit MS-DOS compatible drivers, only Windows drivers.
Hence part of the reason why I've never gotten the Gold Box games to run perfectly on the Windows 98SE side of my Windows 98SE/XP dual-boot system, only on the XP side under DOSbox.
They'll start, but are too fast, the sound doesn't work right, and they crash a lot.
There is no sound at all if I reboot into MS-DOS mode.
Not that running a little fast was a bad thing if I can control it. Almost fifteen years before I was given the Forgotten Realms Silver Edition, I had the Apple II versions of Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds, and I used to set the system speed on my Apple IIGS to "fast" (for 1988) during some of the bigger combats.

Anyways, just limiting yourself to games that run on Microsoft operating systems in the '90s is still a bunch of technical hassles due to a lot of major technological development in that 25 year time period. Moore's Law was not a joke.
The rapid development of computer technology only started to slow down some time after 2005, around the time that Windows Vista came out.

 

I aim exclusively to give people the chance to throw Windows away.
I currently have the machine I described on my blog here and I run every single game it would be capable to run if I had natively installed Windows as my OS through virtualization.
I run Linux.

Are we sure the audience is so low? Are there really so few people really WILLING to keep Windows as their main OS on machines that run older games while there are operating systems that would literally revive those machines?
As far as I knew, it was always compromise, i.e. "I keep Windows, else I can't play...else I'd love Linux".

Well, it's this barrier that I'd like to teach how to break, because I did and flawlessly .

 

I AM PROUD TO INFORM YOU THAT...

http://www.sorcerers.net/forums/blog.php?b=598

.....even the new entry among the games I'm currently playing, Severance - Blade of Darkness, is running flawlessly under Virtual Box on the hardware duly described on my post. Configuration time (try to compare to Wine):

1. Right click on the most appropriate (Direct3D - resource hungrier games) VM
2. Clone VM
3. RAM allocation
4. setup.exe
5. Fine tuning (tests /w or /wo PAE etc.)
6. Let's play.
7. Yes, yes, Wine is better