old windows games complain about "failed to initialize window" and "try changing the screen resolution"

[Stéphane Charette]

My wife has a combination of both new and old games all suffering from the same problem. These includes many from the "Nancy Drew" games, and a new one bought today called "Dream Chronicles" by PlayFirst. The requirements for this latest game for example are: Windows ME/2000/XP/Vista, Pentium III, 128MB of ram, DirectX v7.0.

VirtualBox is version 3.0.2, 32-bit, Ubuntu 9.04-32 host and Windows Vista-32 will latest fixes installed as the guest. Guest additions for VBox3.0.2 have been installed.

When the game starts up, a black window covers the screen after which the following error message is displayed:

Failed to initialize window. Pleae try running the game again. If that doesn't help, try changing the screen resolution and color depth. If that fails, then your video card does not support this game.

This error message is no doubt from the game, not from VB, but I was hoping there might be a solution. I did try to enable the 3-D acceleration setting in the "Display" section for the guest, but that made no difference. I do see some lines in the VB log file about screen resolutions:

00:21:30.754 Display::handleDisplayResize(): uScreenId = 0, pvVRAM=ae908000 w=800 h=600 bpp=32 cbLine=0xC80 00:21:30.760 VBVA: Disabled. 00:21:30.782 VBVA: Enabled. 00:21:30.998 Display::handleDisplayResize(): uScreenId = 0, pvVRAM=ae908000 w=1280 h=1024 bpp=32 cbLine=0x1400 00:21:30.998 VBVA: Disabled. 00:21:31.056 VBVA: Enabled.

I've tried 16, 24, and 32-bit depth for 800x600, 1024x768, and in non-fullscreen modes.