After my little much-needed rest, some more VMware Player hints.
Another problem with playing vintage games on WMware Player is that they mostly have a fixed screen resolution of 800x600 pixels.
Though you can set the window running the guest system to any display size you want, when you start the game, it reverts to a small window of 800x600. You can set the VMware window to full screen mode, but then the game size will stay fixed, and you get huge black borders around your game screen.
See
image for this anomaly.
In the free Player version, there is no facility to scale the screen (in VMware Workstation, there is a 'Stretch Guest' option), which means that every time you want to play the game, you have to set the display size of your (underlying) host system to 800x600!
There is, however, a program you can install to start VMware Player in a fixed, adjusted display of 800x600 by downloading the 12 Noon Display Changer 4.3.2.
From here:
http://12noon.com/If you follow the instructions found here:
https://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-16772 you can create another 'VMware Player Game shortcut' on your desktop and specify as its target (mind you, this is on a Windows 8.1 host):
"C:\Program Files (x86)\12noon Display Changer\dc64.exe" -width=800 -height=600 -depth=32 "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Player\vmplayer.exe"
The initial rescaling of your screen looks truly terrible, but that way, you can still enjoy your old games in a Windows 98 or XP virtual machine!
And of course, if you shut your guest session, your host display will revert to its normal state.
Best,
Rich
P.S. The problem remains of the lack of DirectDraw and Direct3D support in the Windows 98 guest.