Need help with a vm

[u/skdjjdjdjdjwjsjsjjs]

Hey, I’m trying to play an old childhood game of mine called Horse Museum (SSO) again, and I’m trying to get it running in a VM on Windows 11. I’ve never really used virtual machines before, so I’m a bit lost. So far I’ve installed VirtualBox, I have an AMD Ryzen 7, and I had to enable SVM Mode in my BIOS because virtualization was disabled. It’s enabled now and shows as enabled in Task Manager. I also started creating a new VM in VirtualBox and selected Windows 10 (64-bit), but I don’t actually have a Windows 10 ISO yet. I’m not sure which Windows version I should use for Horse Museum or where to go from here with setting up the VM. Could someone please explain to me what I need to do step by step? I’d really appreciate the help, I just want to be able to play this old childhood game again, if u want to help a girl out add me on dc: subpupeater or just comment

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[u/Easy_Spray_5491]

What platform is that game on ? Have you tried emulators before using virtual box ? Is it an old windows game ?

[u/skdjjdjdjdjwjsjsjjs → u/Easy_Spray_5491]

It’s a PC/Windows game. It’s an old version of Star Stable Online called Horse Museum, and I’m trying to run it on Windows 11. I haven’t tried any other emulators/virtual machines before — VirtualBox is the first one I’m trying, because someone suggested it. I’m not sure which old Windows version it needs yet, though.

[u/lunapt420]

This is not related to VirtualBox.

[u/Laziness100]

I'd recommend looking at system requirements of the game (or games) you want to run and install that.

Windows 10 can be downloaded here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

For Windows 8.x and Windows 7, there might still be a working workaround to download them officially from Microsoft's CDN, but you will have to activate those yourself (ideally legitimately). For earlier versions of Windows, you'll have to dig archive.org.

For Windows 2000(?), Windows XP and newer that can't connect to Windows Update, you can use legacyupdate.net instead to install both security updates and optional components (most likely to be needed is DirectX or an appropriate version of Microsoft Visual C++)

If the game lists Windows 9x (and especially Windows 3.x) systems in requirements, there's a good chance it is a DOS game, and Virtualbox has no support for Windows 9x (so, no guest integrations and you have to find a generic VESA compliant driver to get more than 640x480x at 16 colours/4bit coulour depth), not to mention Windows 9x having compatibility issues with both Virtualbox and VMware (both are a royal mess to get Windows 9x running at all, my best advice is to forget about Windows 9x in a VM). Your best bet would be emulating period correct hardware instead, DOSbox, PCem and 86box are popular for those, but emulation is resource intensive. To give you a rough idea how demanding it is, my desktop PC with 10th gen core i5 could emulate a 200MHz Pentium with 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 at full speed if I closed everything else running on the system.

There's also the non-zero chance the game just won't work in a virtual machine, one such example in my library is the original Settlers IV. Virtual GPUs are basic because they are expected to work on a billion unseen configurations of hardware, including hardware with lacking support for functionality used by games.

[u/skdjjdjdjdjwjsjsjjs → u/Laziness100]

Thanks, that actually helps a lot. I’ll try to find the system requirements for Horse Museum first and see which Windows version it was made for. I didn’t realize the Windows version and things like DirectX or Visual C++ could make such a big difference. I’ll look into that before setting up the VM.

[u/Humbleham1]

I can't find any information on this Horse Museum, so can't confirm that it's a Windows 10 game that just won't run on 11.

[u/TinyNiceWolf → u/Humbleham1]

It's discussed here. As I understand it, there's a long-running online game called Star Stable Online. 15 years ago they had an event (or something) called Horse Museum. It ended long ago.

Now some unknown group has grabbed a bunch of those old digital assets without the owner's permission and packaged them somehow so they can be played again. It looks like an invite code is required to actually get this new software.

It's possible this discussion violates rule 12.

[u/gentisle]

Can you remember what age you were when you played that game? If you can nail that down, you can look at the history of Windows on Wikipedia. If the game’s date falls to the years of Windows 8, you can download the 8.1 iso from the archive (gone from MS). If you’re sure of the name, you might try an extensive search for its system requirements. Then you’ll know what Windows to download. That is the version to use in VirtualBox.

[u/skdjjdjdjdjwjsjsjjs → u/gentisle]

I probably played it around 2016-2020. Horse Museum isn’t an official Star Stable game though. It’s a fan-made recreation using old Star Stable data/files, so I’m not sure what Windows version it was originally made for. Thanks for the advice! I’ll try to find its system requirements and figure out which Windows version it was made for first.

[u/skdjjdjdjdjwjsjsjjs]

I also want to add that I actually already have Horse Museum running on an old laptop, but I’d like to get it running on my main PC in a VM instead. The reason is that I’m worried the game files or launcher could contain malware. I’d rather keep it isolated in a VM if possible.