While I’ve been on parental leave the past few weeks, I stumbled upon some old Agatha Christie games from when I was in high school and college and it got me all nostalgic about computing from back then. I might have spent too much time on this endeavor, but my wife said she wanted to go back and re-play these games, so that gave me license to use the time for diving into the Windows XP-era of computing.

Preparations

First, I used VMware Workstation to spin up a trusty old Windows XP virtual machine. It’s worth noting that the latest version of VMware tools that works on Windows XP is 10.0.12. For whatever reason, my version of Workstation (16.2.4) did not include this version of VMware Tools (the install option was greyed out), so I had to install it manually. I also found that it was advantageous to change the resolution of the VM to 1920×1080 (instead of the native 4k resolution of my display, because the font and icon scaling in Windows XP is…lacking.

Tweaks

After installing Windows XP, I remembered a few tweaks I’d made back when I used it full-time.

1. The Windows XP Royale theme (which shipped with Media Center), was much easier on the eyes.

2. Office 2007 Ultimate provided much better compatibility with Office docs.

3. PowerArchiver 2001 was my go-to unzip/archive tool in the VM.

For some reason, when I made ISOs of my games years ago, some of them were in MDS or BIN/CUE format (WHY did Nero think this was a good idea?), so I used AnyToISO to convert the files into ISO format so I could mount them in the VM.

Installing the Games

After I got the OS set up the way I wanted, I began the task of installing the three games my wife was interested in (Agatha Christie: Evil Under the Sun, Murder on the Orient Express, and And Then There Were None). Surprisingly, everything installed without a hitch and did not require any tweaking to get them working properly (at least not yet).

Now that I’ve got these working, though, my nostalgia has only grown, so I’m going to see how many other old XP-era (or before) games I can dig up and get myself lost in a world of high school nostalgia with the lack of responsibilities that came with it. Ahh, the good old days.