RayFan9876 said:
had a Windows XP Home Edition computer that was able to run Rayman 1 perfectly, albeit with some messed up sound effects. But it has all the features that the DOS emulator wouldn't cooperate with, it loads much faster, and it ran smoother than any DOS emulation of the game.
Haruka said:
OK, how the heck it was possible to run without an emulator?...
The explaination is, in fact, a virtual machine that was included with several Windows NT versions, only available for 32-bit systems. The problem why most people cannot seem to run Rayman, is probably because of missing resources, AMD processors or 64-bit operating systems. Often a Windows 98 that was upgraded to XP will include the resources, as backwards compatibility was highly important, before they introduced the .NET framework and new development kits.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_DOS_machine
Virtualization refers to a process of running a virtual hardware platform with a virtual processor, on the same or compatible instruction set as the physical hardware. Emulation, while similar in concept of virtual hardware, refers to the process of translating between processor instruction sets (x86, ARM, PowerPC, etc). You might ask how x86 software emulation on x86 hardware would be any necessary, with DOSBox for instance. This is because fundamental and compatibility reasons with an older revision of x86 that supports older esoteric modes, while it can run on basically any hardware with completely different instruction sets, even x86-64, ARM, etc. VDM is based on another implementation simulating each of the 16-bit calls, by requiring Virtual 8086 mode to be present on the hardware.
