Virtual PC and Command & Conquer

From time to time someone will contact me and complain about the fact that Command & Conquer does not run under Virtual PC. The reason for this is that Command & Conquer uses a CPU call that almost no one ever uses (There are only two other programs that I know of that hit this - Descent and Menuet) - and support for it has never been implemented in Virtual PC. Running Command & Conquer under Virtual PC results in an 'Internal Virtual Machine Error (3)':IVME(3) Under Virtual PC

This is of particular concern to me - as Command & Conquer rates fairly high in my list of 'all time favorite games' - up there with DOOM and Civilization.

Now - before you get to enraged at this obvious deficiency in Virtual PC - let me tell you that it is actually possible to run Command & Conquer under Virtual PC. The trick is that you need to run it in a DOS session under Windows 95 / 98. It turns out that Windows 95 / 98 does not directly execute the problematic CPU call inside of DOS sessions - so as you can see - Command & Conquer runs just fine:

Command & Conquer running under Virtual PC

   Command & Conquer running under Virtual PC    Command & Conquer running under Virtual PC

An interesting point to note is that the version of EMM387.EXE that shipped with Caldera's DR Dos 7.0x also handles this CPU call for us - so an alternate solution is to run it under DR DOS (one of my favorite DOS's)

Well - that's my post for today - I hope you all appreciate it as it cost me at least 4 hours of playing Command & Conquer (there is nothing like the classics)

Cheers,
Ben