Currently available? What about currently unavalable? I called Bethesda and a Rep there told me it'd be okay to post this idea here to see how many gamers would like this idea--how many would find it valuable?

The idea is a Virtual Machine that is strictly for games. All OS supported. Everything from windows 3.1 on up to our latest. So we can play games tht were around back in the day. Including ES Arena and Daggerfall. I know about Dosbox, but even the people who develop that admit that their Dosbox can't run everything from those eras. Also, people, like myself, we try to figure out Dosbox--its a bit too confusing sometimes. Even if we could do it, personally, I'd rather use the OS that these games were designed for anyways. If it was made for windows 98, then I'd rather run it on windows 98--as well as any business apps that can run in any VM anyways today. But the main focus on this new VM is games... no virtual PC I have ever used today has ever ran a single game I have! Even when In tried to run Minecraft on an VPC that had windows XP installed (virtual box) It failed miserably. I'd get to the part to join a server and the game starts to glitch.

I'm sorry, its just that a Virtual Machine should be just that! A freaking virtual machine Still frustraited a bit that no virtual PC truely does what a virtual PC should be able to do by now in todays world [ehem virtual box saying this is a dumb idea cuz gamers are not worth their time or money]. What do computers do?? They run our old apps--isn't that the whole idea to even have a Virtual machine installed in the first place? If we can't get something to run on our phisiical system, then we go and run it in a virtual enviorment.That I think, at least I'm pretty sure, is the whole idea to a virtual pc--to solve our world's incompatibility issue. Not to mention Microsoft's incompatability mode kind of stinks

I found out Silent Hill 2 can't run under Dosbox. Nor can Sim Theme Park. I am sure there are other games that really can only run on the systems they were designed for. I have a PC here with 4GB of video, and an old processor (tho it has 4 cores and virtualization enabled) fully capeable of running games of today as well as a long time ago. I just can't set up a dual partition with NTFS on one for xp and windows 8, and fat32 on the other for windows 98/me, and FAT for widnows 95 and so on. It just doesn't work that way.... I wish it did.

I could just restart and boot up into an older system to play around with that and listen to old midi, but also, most importantly, play my old games--and that is where it is all worth it.

Lets face it, us gamers need our own virtual PC too.. why do the business heads get to have all the fun?? VM's made only for them... its not fair.

Lets not say this would be impossible now---they thoought flight would be impossible at one point in time--look at us now? They said it was impossible to run an OS within an OS at some point in time, look at us now? We got Virtual Machines--and they are very handy for a ton of things--that is if anyone or any of us care to really take advantage of the potential.

Well I'm not going to get too sure about this... right now I am curious to see what others say. It'd be cool to see this in the Bethesda store. I'd buy it, I don't know about any of you. Guess I'll find out though.

Come on, does anyone else think it'd be cool to play older games on the real deal? I miss some of those older games... and older titles... and even the obsolete software sometimes guess I'm just a dork in that reguard. but this can't happen without your support. That's what the phone rep told me at Bethesda customer service. He thought it was a good idea, too... hope u people do, too.

DOSBox is strictly for DOS games, and run the vast majority of DOS games very well.

That would be a bit of a legal hassle if a Windows 98 was to be included as well (would Microsoft agree with that?), not to mention that Windows 98 http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/312108 (which most modern CPUs are). You could slow down the virtualization to get around that, but chances are that would slow down the games as well.

Yeah, neither of those two those games are DOS games (so DOSBox is out of the question), but somewhat modern Windows games that use DirectX. To run Silent Hill 2 on a modern computer in Windows 7 or 8, all you need to do is to manually disable all the cores but one.

Sure, that's why I still have a computer from 1998 to use when I want to play older games.

Overall it's not a bad idea, but I feel this is really something you should ask Microsoft and not Bethesda. They are the ones who own Windows 98 after all.

I figured a developer of games would be right to ask. If we already own a license key for those systems then we still do have the usage rights. I myself own a windows 95 and a windows ME installation disks as well as the stickers on the bottom of the PC they go to. I'd throw the pc away and transport the key over to my VM--and that is legal to do. As long as they are removed from the machines and brought on over to the VM--its all in the license key. I still have 2, I still have rights to use them. Virtual box supports XP, Vista, 7, and 8 right now. Its all open source.

I wonder if its because maybe they wrote all code from scratch and used none of MS Source code--similar to what ReactOS does and how Openoffice.org can open ms documents while at the same time, not violate any copyright laws.

MS didn't like the idea either. They're all about business too, not really games. They make all their money doing business and developing software for business. So, they have no interest either. Seems only a game studio like Bethesda might take interest in this idea--because games are how they make their money, ya know? Seems if the money may be there, that's the only time a company of some sort would ever take interest. Its got to relate to their business.