Soo this is how I've made Vista pay.. (i mean Play!)

Wudda miserable Operating system it is.. (see this post for how i really feel ;-)

Basically i'm gonna list all the ways I've patched, tweaked, or otherwise manhandled that OSin order to make all my pinball games play on it..

So for today, first, i'm, gonna say what I did about the 'bottom of the ladder' games , the 'click & play' onbes , or the old win 3.1 ones or any smaller not so serious pinball.
Some of them are actually pretty cool , like the Sierra 'Take A Break' pinballs, or the TDK pinkall machine (s a small game that came with TDK products for a short while)
or General Admission Sports pinball...
None of these would either run, or install under Vista, irregardless of compatibility settings..(which, from the research I've done, appears only to report a different OS to the software, and nothing else)

I discovered , however, that Virtual PC is now FREE.. and downloadable from M$'s website..
And so, also, is Virtual Box, from Microsoft's Arch Nemesis.. Sun/Oracle (well it used to be Sun java, but it's been acquired by Oracle).
Soo..after setting up both VMs and installing every version of windows I have laying around..
I started to find out what runs where..
I've made one virtual machine with the aforementioned 'Light' pinballs here..

also for 'Take A Break Pinball' which has all the sierra games in it, like King's Quest, LL Larry, etc. it only runs in VPC..

and General Admission Sports Pinball, with which I had  real problem with, until i found only one VM and only one screen setting that worked..

well............

As for the rest.............

Unfortunately, the other games that normally run native On Windows ME will not run on the same, on VPC..
I get the following message "Unable to determine refresh rate of the display.. the application will now close"
If I use Win 2000, i get a memory error..
I'm still going to try, again, installing win 95, but the additions don't work in anything earlier than ME, and without them it uis just TOO cumbersome..

....and I don't own a copy of XP.. if I did I'd have installed it on my PC proper.. but what with that Activation B$.. (although there's one version of XP that doesn't use it, anyone know which that is?)
thats all for now....