Probably have to find a crack, I would link a site but it might be unwelcomed. :-)

game *cough* copy *cough* world

vmware is free to use for individuals as well. I still play Chaos Overlords on my win 95 emulated machine.
[Reply]

Think my parents still have a windows me machine laying around the house I could ship to you :-)
[Reply]

VMware isn't free anymore unfortunately. Even Player costs money.

Plus if I were going to go the virtualization route, I'd probably just buy Fusion and run everything on my Mac since it's like 3x more powerful than my Win10 machine.
[Reply]

By the way, I've used GCW for years. The problem is that the disks are protected with SafeDisk. Windows 10 no longer contains the SafeDisk system files so a NoCD crack is useless. I can't even install the game, it won't read the DRM off the disk so it gets to 99% done and says it failed.
[Reply]

Yeah, you'd probably be best off loading VMWare Fusion on the Mac, and giving all available resources to the VM. You'll see a considerable performance reduction running via VM. But hopefully if you tweak the graphics resources enough for the VM, it will be enough for the lower graphics requirements of the old XP games to run smoothly. Would depend on the Mac graphics.
[Reply]

Yeah, I'm pretty sure I have enough horsepower for old Windows games, even in VMWare. It's an i7 quad core with 32GB RAM and a Radeon Pro 580 8GB. I can run Windows VM's in virtual box, it's just that VB doesn't do graphics acceleration so it doesn't do any games well.

I had Windows 10 on Bootcamp partition and it was plenty fast and I could play modern games but couldn't install the old games because of SafeDisk. Otherwise I wouldn't have a problem at all.
[Reply]

Ok... came up with plan B.

What about if you partition off your HD again and install Windows 8.1 (assuming you will have fewer driver issues there but not sure).

From there, if it has been installed, remove KB3086255 and you should be able to play them again.
[Reply]

My daughter is getting a new PC for school. Here existing laptop came with Windows 7 so that might actually be an option. I guess we'll find out. :-)
[Reply]

I am super curious to find out if it did. Please report back!
[Reply]

My son plays Roller Coaster Tycoon on Win 10. But it was bought and installed thru Steam.
[Reply]

One of the games I want to play isn't available on Steam, or anything else for that matter. My old CD is the only way to get it.

But my daughter's new 2-in-1 for school came today so I will have a 3-year old Windows 10 machine to test with in a few days.
[Reply]

My whole thing may have gotten a bit easier.

I did find a version of VMWare Player, explicitly and only for Windows 10, that is free and will run exactly one guest OS - in my case Windows XP.

My daughter wants to setup her new machine tonight and then I'll start reclaiming her old one. Might be a few days to back up her data and get everything up and running but I'm hopeful.

Reading the results from others that have tried it specifically with my target games, it looks promising.
[Reply]

I do have a question for you Windows guys - it's been a long time since I've worked with Windows.

The PC I have shipped with a 1TB HDD. I want to replace it with a 500GB SSD that I have sitting here doing nothing.

However, I want to preserve the copy of Windows 10 that shipped with the PC, the one loaded on the HDD, because it's an activated copy of Windows.

I have a licensed version of AEOMI Backupper that says it will allow me to clone system partitions to unlike hardware. Should I just do that?
[Reply]

yup. exactly what you want to do.
[Reply]

As far as SafeDisc goes; there are multiple work arounds. One involves forcing Windows 10 to load the driver in a developer mode. There's also various programs which will remove the SafeDisc wrapper.

For copying Windows to a new drive, there are lots of free programs to do it. I remember using xcopy with the switches to copy hidden/system files. Then an fdisk/mbr to make the drive bootable...
[Reply]