VM Ware question

I've installed VMWare on my Windows 8 computer, successfully, and installed XP on that. Everything is working well as far as I can see. I did this purposely to be able to play Pandora's Box, an old but good Microsoft game. The game installs and plays perfectly with one problem. I can't get it to display in full screen, only in a window. I've changed the screen resolution to both low (800x600) and as high as I can go (1920x963). The game just stays the same, no matter what. I also tried changing the screen resolution in Win 8, no joy. I really need the game full screen to see what can be very small details of puzzles. Any ideas?

BTW, I know Windows 8 is supposed to come with its own virtual machine, but it's only available in Windows 8 Professional,.

Older games tended to have a fixed resolution.

I don't think VMware Player has the capability to stretch a 640x480 window to fit most of the screen. VMware Workstation can do it, but VMware Workstation is $$$.

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/245177
http://superuser.com/questions/452534/stretch-vmware-player-guest-os-to-fullscreen

Apparently there is a 3rd party tool that will force Windows 8 to use 640x480 resolution on the desktop. Once you do that, the 640x480 window for Pandora's Box will fill the screen.

Hi, Diat! So it's Bristol you are over here. I hoped Jenny or Inland would have some suggestions for you.

Hi Drac, yes, it's me. Thanks Jenny, I'm going to try the Superuser's solution. Fingers crossed.

Have hit a snag - the instructions are to change host resolution to 640x480 which I simply cannot do, it won't go anywhere near that figure, not even to 800x600. So since that's the first step and I can't go further, I'll just have to play with the game in a small window, because I can't put out the money for VM Workstation which is full of things I'd never use.

Thanks for trying to help, at least I've got my XP for old games now!

Well, it was worth a shot anyway.

That's why they say to use a 3rd party utility to do it.
Windows 8 doesn't want to let you go that low.
Unfortunately I haven't had any luck finding said utility.

No idea if it will work, but what happens if you run VMware Player in compatibility mode and set the compatibility settings to use 640x480?

You could also try VirtualBox instead of VMware and see if it allows you to resize the window or go full screen.

Probably a dumb question - but just for my own information - doesn't the monitor also have to have the capability of offering full screen 640/480 ??

I've just tried Jenny's suggestion of setting compatibility mode to 640x480 which works but brings up the game so huge that only half of it shows on screen! Still mucking around, I'm supposed to go into Unity mode, but so far that doesn't work properly.

I'll keep you posted.

Strange. I wonder if it's related to widescreen monitor instead of the squarer, less wide, monitor the game was made for.

I haven't been able to find this mysterious "3rd party utility" that was referred to by the people at superuser or vmware forums -- unless there they are talking about a utility that is specific to a certain video card.

Another thing you could try is using the Windows 8 Magnifier to magnify the part of the screen with the game window.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/use-magnifier-see-items


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Either the monitor or the video card has to be able to scale the image.

Thanks, Jenny100
[I asked because when I bought my newest monitor I had to shop around for one that would display 640x480 - because it had to "share" with my Win98 and WinXP machines.
Which is probably not a problem Bristol is having.]

Your gfx card software should also allow you to create a custom resolution if the one you want isnt there in the list by default.

The magnifier works perfectly! At 200 percent the game is easily playable, but I'm using the magnifier that comes with XP, not Win8.

Thanks again for all the trouble you've gone to. Hopefully it may help someone else trying to play Pandora's Box (and why Microsoft can't bring out a patch for one of their own games I'll never understand. Are they not making enough money?)

I'm sure Microsoft has long ago moved on from a game made for Windows 95/98 fifteen years ago!