Thanks, it confirmed what I suspected. The VMWare Graphics Driver is faulty. The result given was:
(Failed)
Video Card
Minimum: NVidia Geforce 8600GT, ATI Radeon 3670HD or equivalent
You Have: VMware SVGA II
(Passed) Pixel Shader version 3.0 3.0
(Passed) Vertex Shader version 3.0 3.0
(Failed) Dedicated Video RAM 256 MB 128 MB
(first column of numbers being the requirement, second column what was found)
Obviously the GPU pass-through is inadequate.
Raises the obvious question - is there a config that can be safely tweaked? The host GPU (nVidia GEForce 680) has plenty of dedicated video ram to spare. This may also be the reason that a few other games (Falcon 4.0 Allied Force etc) do not run well in a vm.
Can I just edit the xp guest .vmx file?
e.g. svga.vramSize = "268435456"
[Edit] I answered my own question. No matter what silly number I set in this parameter DirectDraw refuses to detect more than 247296000 approx. There is obviously a bug in the video driver somewhere.
Message was edited by: EdP I had a flash of genius and increased the maximum allowable monitor size to the max. This increased the video ram to NEARLY 256Mb --- but was not good enough as DirectDraw reports less than 256Mb available to it. Just a shade under, but enough to fail the minimum graphics card spec. I suggest that the max monitor size is increased sufficiently to get over the 256 Mb VRam requirement of quite a number of old games.
