Duke Nukem under Virtual PC / Virtual Server (non-3D)

When most people hear the words 'Duke Nukem' they thing of a 3D shooting game (and a darned good one too). However I think of old school platform gaming. Long before Duke Nukem 3D - Duke Nukem first appeared in an Apogee platform game. It had the classic shareware formula of having three episodes - where the first episode was available for free.

Duke Nukem runs perfectly under Virtual PC:

However there is one problem if you try to run it under Virtual Server. Duke Nukem uses the PC speaker for all of its sound effects. In order to make the sound effects work - Duke Nukem uses an old trick of playing a large number of short PC speaker beeps at different tones close together. This works fine on Virtual PC - however Virtual Server translates all PC speaker beeps into a standard system beep - which is about half a second long, and always the same pitch.

The result is that under Virtual Server the sound of Duke Nukem firing his gun will result in a minute of your computer beeping away merrily - and Duke Nukem will freeze while this happens.

You can avoid this problem by disabling sound under Duke Nukem - and then it is actually very playable on Virtual Server:

Cheers,
Ben