Playing Windows 2000 games in windowed Mode in Windows 10

Question

I have a game that dates pre-Windows 2000/ME on hard copy that I tend to play on my PC. The game (Throne of Darkness) is brilliant to play, however I would much like to run it in Windowed mode as my resolution on my windows 10 computer with Geforce 720 Nvidia graphics scales down really far so that I cannot see my full desktop.

I also need to keep pressing Ctrl, Alt + Del to run task manager to have the game minimise which is a pain...

Is there any way that I can get this game (and others like it) to run in windowed mode?

I tried Alt + return to no avail. Is there a possible Registry Hack I can carry out? (I understand this route may be more suited for Superuser and the like)

Answer 1

If the game don't have a Windowed mode your best option is to run it inside a VM.

What I mean, the game will run in full screen inside the VM, but the VM can be Windowed so you have your Windowed mode and full compatible with old games as well.

You find complete instructions on how to do the VM here

1. Download the XP Mode from Microsoft
2. Install 7-zip
3. Use 7-zip to extract VMs contents
4. After extraction. browse to Sources and notice the xpm file. Right click on xpm and choose 7-zip > Open archive.
5. Extract it to a location of your choice. Rename it to VirtualXPVHD.vhd.
6. Clean up. You can go ahead and delete the file downloaded in Step 1 and all the other files extracted from it, except for VirtualXPVHD.vhd.
7. Activate Hyper-V on your Windows 10 (In order to enable Hyper-V, you need to go to Win+X (opens the power user menu) > Control Panel > Programs > Turn Windows features on or off, under Programs and Features.)
8. Create a virtual machine for XP Mode in Hyper-V Manager using your VirtualXPVHD.vhd
9. Run the virtual machine
10. Install your games

Answer 2

If you're open to some more technical solutions, you can dual-boot Linux and run very old games under WINE. This may resolve some issues older games can have with Windows 10 and its more restrictive security model. The emulation layer will also allow you to overrule the application's control.

E.g. wine explorer /desktop=VxH program.exe will run your program in a limited size desktop. You can use Linux' multi-desktop features to start an additional desktop at a lower resolution for games that run at very tiny resolutions. (E.g. a 640x480 game on a 4K native screen).

You could also try out VMWare or microsoft's own Hyper-V to emulate an older windows version completely accurately in a virtual machine. Of course, Win-2000 would not have any security updates so I would not recommend you connect that virtual machine to the internet in any way.