Flight Simulator Running on Windows 7 on Virtual Box

Crashnburn

Crashnburn

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Has anyone ever done this successfully. I'm asking because as Windows 10 evolves, my Prepar3D v3 keeps having more issues. FSX:SE is already to the point that it won't save settings from one session to the next.

I have a copy of the SportStar flight simulator model that only runs on Prepar3D v3 and FSX:SE. Among other reasons to keep it, it has a Garmin GNS-480 that I'd like to learn on the fly, literally.

Originally, I could load a new scenario without the sim hanging up, but now, the first time I try to reload, it hangs and I have to restart almost everything, including the simulation. After the restart, I can reset the sim twice before it hangs. I hope it never gets to the place it won't even load and run.

I wish I'd kept my Windows 7 disks when I upgraded to Windows 10, but there are Windows 7 installation disks available.

I have 2 TB of SSD, 32 GB RAM, and an 18 core CPU, so I don't think I'd be hardware limited.
 
Dual boot instead of virtual is an option. I do that for Win 7 programs. Run it on a separate drive (SSD) but you could use the same drive if you wanted.
If the drive fails, you'd have to reinstall both 10 and 7 though.
 
This is certainly an interesting question. I am actually curious as to a definite answer. With that said though, here are my thoughts.

My first inclination would be to simply upgrade the flight sim software. Neither of the versions are current versions. It looks like you can go w/ either the newest version of Prepare3D, MSFS, or X-Plane for $60.

However, if you really don't want to update the software, I would go w/ Skyrys62's idea and dual boot it. While I agree you have a strong computer system, I have never been a fan of running more software than needed for my objective. You're wanting to add a second OS to the overhead that your hardware has to power before getting to the FS. If nothing else the CPU / RAM would have a lighter load w/o the extra OS.

Although I am very familiar w/ VMs, to include the Virtual Box variety, I have found them to frequently have little gotchas, like the classic ctrl-alt-del combination. Your host machine will intercept that, even when the keyboard goes to the VM. There is a way to send the key combination, of course, but the limitation is still there. Other little caveats exist.

I am interested in seeing where you go with this, seriously.
 
One way to do it, if you have a tower or computer with some room, is have multiple drives. They make power switches that fit into a drive bay, that will let you turn on or off internal drives. Not sure if it still works with current motherboards/bios, but I have a computer I put together right before covid with 3 SATA drives in it. Depending on which drives were selected, it would boot Win 7 or Linux. When running one OS or the other, they would both see the third data drive. Neither OS drive could wreck the other OS drive. I set it up specifically so there would be less overhead and hassle of a dual boot single drive system. (That's what I have in my laptop, but it is a bit of a pita from time to time.)

My experience has been that running multiple versions of Windows on the same PC is easier if the drives don't see each other.

This is the gizmo I have, but there are other versions:

https://www.amazon.com/Kingwin-Optimized-Controls-Provide-Longevity/dp/B00TZR3E70/
 
Albany Tom said:
One way to do it, if you have a tower or computer with some room, is have multiple drives. They make power switches that fit into a drive bay, that will let you turn on or off internal drives. Not sure if it still works with current motherboards/bios, but I have a computer I put together right before covid with 3 SATA drives in it. Depending on which drives were selected, it would boot Win 7 or Linux. When running one OS or the other, they would both see the third data drive. Neither OS drive could wreck the other OS drive. I set it up specifically so there would be less overhead and hassle of a dual boot single drive system. (That's what I have in my laptop, but it is a bit of a pita from time to time.)

My experience has been that running multiple versions of Windows on the same PC is easier if the drives don't see each other.

This is the gizmo I have, but there are other versions:

https://www.amazon.com/Kingwin-Optimized-Controls-
Provide-Longevity/dp/B00TZR3E70/
Click to expand...

Thanks, sounds like it would work.

My experience with running Win 7 on Virtual Box was bad. The OS was slow w/o installing the Flight Simulator, so I uninstalled Win 7, and Virtual Box. When I rebooted, the file system was corrupted, and I had to rebuild it. The first time, I told it to leave my files alone, which was fine, but the SportStar SW wouldn't install. So, I rebuilt the system from scratch, and it now installs.

I also tried Dual Boot, but the selector all the books say will show up on boot, didn't. I wasn't able to get it to dual boot, so I reverted back to Windows 10.

I'm transitioning to a C-172, and I got a Carenado C-172 SP package for Prepar3D v2 - v5. The Skyhawks I'm renting at the FBO have steam gauges, N12234 also has a Garmin 430. I have Remote Flight set up to display steam gauges and have 3rd party SW to install the 430 to any plane in my flight simulator.

I shot some simulated landings last night, and my conclusion was I'd do a lot better if I could maintain speed, altitude, and heading. With 180 HP, the SP gets out of whack a lot faster than the 100 HP SportStar.
 
What OS are you running the on the Hypervisor (Host)? Virtualbox on Windows does not have the best performance, and has some limits on its hardware acceleration functions (I think it works slightly better with Macs, but it works a lot better on Linux).

Have you tried running your Windows 7 instance on Hyper-V (Microsoft's Virtualization Solution)?

Have you tried running Prepar3d on Windows 10 in a the Windows 7 compatibility mode? (I have not used it for Win 7, but I used to use it for old software that wanted to run on XP)

I'm guessing you are running an i9, which means you would not have an onboard GPU. Most VM solutions us software based GPU acceleration which performs pretty terribly, the solution is allowing the VM to directly access the GPU. Its been years since I used a Windows machine at home, so I am working off of memory, but last I used it Virtualbox on Windows could not pass the GPU to a Virtual Machine unless there was another GPU for the Host PC to run on. This is an easy solution if your CPU has an integrated GPU and you can just pass your NVidia or AMD card, but if you only have the high end card you need to be able to run the host headless or allocate the card on the fly. The Linux Kernel Virtual Machine and VMWare's Esxi can do both and when running Windows Server 2016+ HyperV can go headless and pass through (but I don't know about allocation).
 
I will venture that frame timing could be an issue based on another platform that tried this.
 
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