VR Sports Powerboat Racing - anyone got Direct3D working on anything newer than Win98

VR Sports Powerboat Racing by Interplay... when you fire it up you can choose between "Primary Display Driver" (i.e. Direct3D, it uses DX6 or 6.1 I believe) or "Software Only". Even on my Win8.1 64bit machine "Software Only" mode works fine, but it's limited to 320x240 so is SUPER blocky!


Has anyone ever got the 3D version working? I seem to remember it working on my ancient Win98 machine with a Voodoo5 card, but it doesn't work on my WinXP 32bit with Nvidia 7800GS+ graphics, and doesn't on my new PC either.


Basically when you choose the "Primary Display Driver", it launches a full screen window called "Powerboat Racing", then after a few seconds, the mouse pointer vanishes. If you alt-tab you can then see there's an error message about "DDraw Error: Unable to open screen", with a button to close the game.


Anyone got any ideas?

 

VirtualBox and VMware Workstation now support Direct3D, although to what extent I'm not sure. You may want to try looking down that path. Otherwise your other option is likely finding/building an old PC with the supported hardware.

 

I believe they only support something like DirectX8 in WinXP, which still wouldn't work.

I'm not overly fussed, it's more one of those "be nice if it was possible to hack it to work" type deals!