Well, I finally managed to play Rise of Nations on my Windows XP virtual machine, thanks to VirtualBox 3.0 and its Direct3D support! For those of you who haven't tried it yet, you just need to install Windows XP like a regular virtual machine. Then, when installing the VirtualBox Guest Additions, make sure you reboot your virtual machine, press F8 to enter "safe mode" and install the Guest Additions when in safe mode, because if you try to install Guest Additions in normal mode, Windows' file protection mechanism will not let you install some DLLs VirtualBox needs to replace to use the 3D hardware directly from the host computer.
Here's a screenshot of Rise of Nations on my WinXP virtual machine:
One final consideration: I used the Spanish version, because I live in Mexico and I bought the game in Spanish, but the result is the same, no matter what language you use. Version 3 of VirtualBox has definitely improved its support for using 3D graphics hardware inside a virtual machine! The only tiny detail is that I noticed the game doesn't run as smooth as in my real Windows XP machine, but since I have an AMD Sempron w/ 2GB of RAM, I can't really say my hardware is helping VirtualBox! If you have better hardware and want to try VirtualBox 3 with a game like Rise of Nations, Age of Empires III, or some of the more recent titles, I'll appreciate if you keep me informed of your findings...
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