Getting 2000era Windows game running on newer hardware?

[Clydefrosch]

So there's this Bubble Bobble like game called Aquaball Special where Balls come floating down a river and you blow them up by matching colors that my mother liked to play in the xp and win 7 era before it stopped working.

A demo (with a typical 2000 era launcher) can be found here:

https://www.deutschland-spielt.de/spiele/action/aquaball/ (I know it looks a bit gaudy but it's not malware as far as I can tell and both the Deutschland Spielt and aball.exe can be deinstalled by windows)


I've tried getting it to run on her new pc, without success. I tried all the compatibility modes and even went and tried xp and win 7 running in virtualbox without success.

Anyone got another idea how to let her play this? i thought about trying to dual boot a win 7 installation but that might already be too much and i dont wanna risk her secretly migrating back to 7 because switching is too confusing either.


I also know there are similar games, but they're not the same of course

 

[Latiodile]

i thought this would be a graphics API thing that could be solved with wined3d/dxvk but it just instantly crashes taking some of the free time with it, it might just be a weird old DRM thing

 

[Exnor]

You can try installing VmWare workstation (its free for personal usage) or Virtual Box, on Windows 10 or 11 ( or any Linux distro) and then install Windows XP on a virtual machine and see if it works.

 

[Clydefrosch]

You can try installing VmWare workstation (its free for personal usage) or Virtual Box, on Windows 10 or 11 ( or any Linux distro) and then install Windows XP on a virtual machine and see if it works.

as I said, I already tried that and couldn't get it to run in virtual box either.

Post automatically merged: Sep 28, 2025

i thought this would be a graphics API thing that could be solved with wined3d/dxvk but it just instantly crashes taking some of the free time with it, it might just be a weird old DRM thing

all i know is way back when, we could just copy the game folder (of the unlocked game) from xp over to the win 7 pc and it just worked

 

[Exnor]

as I said, I already tried that and couldn't get it to run in virtual box either.

Post automatically merged: Sep 28, 2025

all i know is way back when, we could just copy the game folder (of the unlocked game) from xp over to the win 7 pc and it just worked

Well I've downloaded the game, installed on VMware workstation Pro version 17.6 and guess what? It works.

VMspecs are: 1 CPU, 1.5GiB of RAM (overkill btw), 3D Accelerated graphics with 64MiB of ram, OS: Windows XP SP3 , NO network interface, Sound support and USB 2.0.
Screen resolution 1024x768 32bit color.

I hope this helps.

 

[Kwyjor]

and even went and tried xp and win 7 running in virtualbox without success

Did you enable 3D acceleration in Virtualbox? I wasn't even sure Virtualbox had that capability. I'm pretty sure VMware Workstation does, which is why that might work better.

The ultimate solution for older games is to run Windows 98 in PCem or 86box, as they offer full 3D hardware emulation. (WMware and Virtualbox just use 3D acceleration "passthrough" to your computer's actual 3D hardware, which is good for performance.)

The other thing I might suggest is BoxedWine.

 

[SylverReZ]

all i know is way back when, we could just copy the game folder (of the unlocked game) from xp over to the win 7 pc and it just worked

If you open "aball.exe" into a hex editor (located in "C:\Program Files (x86)\DEUTSCHLAND SPIELT\AquaBall"), go to hex address 0x31B0 (that's the start of the main game executable). Strip off the old header from 0x0 - 0x31AF, now you don't get that annoying trial pop-up each time you run it. This is just as bare bones as PopCap's old DRM where they embedded the full game into the wrapper then dumped it as a hidden file into the program directory.