Virtual Machines for Virtual Horses

Video games, and more specifically PC games, hold a special place in my childhood memories. I don’t play games nearly as much now as I did when I was a kid, but I still enjoy learning about and maybe trying out some newer games--usually through my boyfriend who is much more adventurous in his gaming habits than I ever was. When I do attempt to play a game on my own I’ve found that I’m most interested in revisiting the oldies that I played as a kid, if only for the nostalgia. 

My PC-gaming habit probably reached its peak around 1998, when my dad plopped a big, loud Dell in his home office and started bringing me along on his trips to CompUSA. Around the same time, I was really into horses and so I developed a strong interest in any game that involved horseback riding. As it turns out, though, most horseback riding PC games of that time were not great, and a blog post I read from The Mane Quest  provides some reasons why. The reason that most deeply resonated with me is the fact that most players of horse-related games simply did not have high expectations for gaming quality. I was honestly excited to find any game that involved horses at all, since there weren’t a whole lot of options. (I even played the Barbie Riding Club game despite absolutely hating Barbie dolls.) It was rare for me to notice or care that the virtual horses in many of the games were anatomically awkward or that the competitions didn’t do a great job of following real-life horse-sport rules. 

Probably the best horse game that I can remember playing was Mary King’s Riding Star. I’ve recently been searching around the internet for information about the old PC games that I loved, and have since discovered a handful of websites that provide downloads for many of my 90’s favorites. I decided to go searching for good old Riding Star and it really wasn’t that difficult to find. What was difficult, however, was getting the game to properly install and run on Windows 10. I think I spent an entire Saturday morning trying to get this game to work on my dang laptop, which now that I think of it probably added some realism to my reenactment of childhood memories. You can go ahead and Google all kinds of compatibility troubleshooting instructions; I tried all of them and nothing worked. 

So I did what anyone else does when they desperately want to get a 90’s horse game on their computer: I built a virtual machine on my laptop that runs Windows 98, and I installed the game onto my virtual machine. Victory! Once that was complete, the hardest part was remembering all the keyboard controls for virtual dressage and show jumping. I won’t go into the details of building virtual machines here because this is not a tech-support blog or anything; I just wanted to share my little story because I thought it was fun and interesting. If you want to learn how to build a virtual machine and maybe play some old games, or if you just miss that classic Windows 98 startup sound as much as I didn’t even know I did until now, a quick Google search can help you out with that project.