The Wonders of VirtualBox for old software

Since I have to support the classes for our department at the university, I have to deal with some folks who really like some very old software for their classes. One faculty member had a program written with the 1995 version of Macromedia Authorware that she distributes to her students to run every year. Unfortunately, that software is now over 15 years old and it does not run on 64 bit Windows 7 (and of course not on a Mac.) The solution? I built a small VirtualBox virtual disk (.VDI) file with 32 bit XP (Service Pack 1 even!) and the ancient Authorware presentation together on it that runs on just about anything that can run the VirtualBox application. I tested it on a 64 bit Windows 7 Dell Optiplex 780, my trusty iMac, and also my even trustier Ubuntu 10.04 Dell Precision. It runs like a champ on all platforms since that is the beauty of VirtualBox! And since VirtualBox is open source it is also free! The virtual disk file ended up being over 800MB, but over our fast gigabit network that is not a big deal. And if someone messes up their virtual machine, they can just delete the file and download it from our web server again. I thought it would take a while to setup but the XP installation ran very quickly on the Windows 7 system I was using to create it. I just booted it off an XP ISO image file and ran the install in less than half an hour. That was probably a lot faster than running it off a real physical CD. It is always fun to watch the "virtual Microsoft install time" decreasing much faster than real time. If only we could really change time like that...

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