X-COM: Apocalypse under Virtual PC

X-COM: Apocalypse has been one of the trickiest games in the X-COM series to get running under Virtual PC. The run down of the issues that I encountered while setting this up were:

1) X-COM: Apocalypse seems to have a problem installing off of a .ISO file instead of a physical CD ROM. Installing off of a .ISO file results in the installer crashing when it tries to determine speed of the CD-ROM. In order to install I had to use a physical CD - then things went fine.

2) X-COM: Apocalypse also has the 'Internal Virtual Machine Error (3)' problem (discussed in this post: https://weblogs.asp.net/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2004/10/21/245528.aspx). So in order to work under Virtual PC - X-COM: Apocalypse needs to be run under a Windows 95 / Windows 98 virtual machine.

3) X-COM: Apocalypse uses a VESA display mode that is not compatible with the video driver that is installed with the Virtual Machine Additions - so in order to play this game I had to use a Windows 95 virtual machine without the additions installed.

Once I had done all this - it ran just fine:

Cheers,
Ben