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[jack07]

Originally Posted by hunvagy

As Fifth pointed out, the VPC solution is viable, but not very user friendly. Since you had to fight the exact same problems with older games you would in a real W98 environment. And using XP leads you back to square one. If that old game doesn't offer saving, then there's a password, or the game was meant to be played in one session, so tough it up. Creating VPC snapshots to "save state" in a 2 MB game doesn't seem really worth the time for me. But that's just IMO.

Well, I haven't used other virtual machines so far and I have to say I'm pretty happy with Virtual PC.

I believe other virtual machines are a better choice for testing operating systems, since they support more features (like shared folder, USB drives, etc.). But for playing and saving old school games - Virtual PC gets the job done just fine.

It has a minimalistic user interface, which is very easy to use. After you hide the menu bars, it's basically like playing a game in a windowed mode. When you close the window the game saves. Which is all you need.

As for the need for saving the game's state - it can be very important in my opinion. This trick can come in handy when playing long games (like Amazing Spiderman), which are nearly impossible to complete otherwise. Furthermore, you can save a particular mission in a game with non-linear story line (like GTA1) and test different outcomes.