Greetings Steemian! Back again with me 
Playing old school games Virtua Cop for Windows in virtual environment
Hello, old-school gamers…
In today post, I will be continuing on sharing some of my experience playing old school games called "Virtua Cop".
For those 90's kids, let's go back to the old days where fun was fun and the only thing that we care is having fun. Alright, that is not quite true, isn't it? well, for us who has experience playing games in a very minimal specification device, when we do not fight with other gamers talking about who has the best Frame rate per second [FPS] and split-screen multiplayer. Those are the memories that going to stay in our mind forever right, at least for personally. Those old days were really fun. I do not want to say nowadays is not fun, it is fun too, but for me, there is something missing. I do not feel the same way as it was when I play computer games in old days compared to these days games.
I do not know for sure, what is this missing thing? why do I not feel the same way as with old days games? After thinking a while, perhaps, it could be because these days games are more focus on the graphics rather than the storyline or the gameplay. But this is also not quite true, there are also many these days games have a good story in it, good gameplay, and moreover, as the bonus, the graphics in the game with today's technology make it really looks like reality. Then, the reason why I did not feel the same must be because the new thing that I experience when I play it. You know, it is like when you got your very first car, for example, the way we feel compared to when we got our second car is must be different right?
Anyhow, regardless of how I feel playing games in old days versus how I feel now. Playing games is still fun, right? For me personally, I like playing casual games or we can call it an easy game. The games that only have simple objectives or goals. It could be, this another reason why I love playing retro games or old school games. And for that, in today article, I will show you how to install one of the old school games called "Virtua Cop". I will install this games on current hardware and try playing it.
Virtua Cop / Virtua Squad by SEGA
Image source: VGM
Virtua Cop or in North American also called virtua squad for windows version is a game published by SEGA Enterprise. It is a first-person shooter game with light-gun in arcade mode. This game originally comes from the year 1994, and then in the year of 1997, the game was ported to Windows. The game followed by two sequels called "Virtua Cop 2" and "Virtua Cop 3". In term of technology, this game has a really cool story. Virtua cop is the first person shooter game that implemented 3D polygon, it is a technology that influences other game later. The games that influenced by this game is the like of "Crysis", "House of the Dead", "Resident Evil", and more. If you want more information about this technology, you can find it here
Virtua cop is a very simple and good story games, the player will act as a cop that tries to eliminate the mob. You can play the game in single player mode or multiplayer. And for the map, there are 3 maps that the player can choose. That three map is related to the difficulties level of the game. There are 3 dificulties level, "Beginner", "Medium", and "Hard". In the game, it called "Stage". When first you start the game, the player has to choose the stage level that they want to play. Below is an example of stage select menu showed in the game. This example is from "Virtua Cop 2".
Installing Virtua Cop
To install an old game, it usually does not work well with the current Operating system. So, I suggest you installed using virtual environment. Here, I use virtual box and install Microsoft Windows XP on it. The specification of my VirtualBox is in this image below. If you do not want to install a virtual machine, you also can install a software called DOSBox. It is a DOS-emulator. This emulator use SDL-Library which make it very easy to port to another platform. This software also supported Mac OS, Linux, and even FreeBSD. you can download the software to install the game. I will write another article in the future on how to install DOSBox, but for now, let's use a virtual machine.
If you have done with your environment, Now, it is time to install the game. We will install Virtua Cop 2. For this old games, you can search in google and you will find a lot of websites that provides free download of this game. The game usually comes in an archive. So, you do not need to install. The system requirement for the game is as follow:
- OS: Windows XP, 98, Vista.
- Processor: Intel P3 400Mhz.
- RAM: 128 MB.
- Hard Drive: 40MB.
- Graphics Card: 16MB.
- Keyboard and Mouse.
After you finished downloading the game, open your virtual machine and copy the game to your virtual machine. Then extract the archive and find the game application file and double-click it to open. You will see the following image. To start the game, you need to click any button and then you will be asked to select the stage, here is the stage that related to the difficulties level for your game. After you choose your stage and then you are ready to go. Bellow is the image of the starting screen.
