Recent versions of VirtualBox have been touting their support for Direct3D. I haven't had a need to try this till now, but it turns out it's relatively easy to set up. The trick is to install the Guest Additions in safe mode, which you reach by pressing F8 at just the right moment as Windows starts up. After that is done go into the settings for that virtual machine and tick Enable 3D Acceleration. You can run dxinfo.exe to check that it's working.
The easiest way to install FractalPeaks is to use its installer, which will automatically download and install .Net Framework 1.1 and DirectX 9 with managed extensions (Dec 2004 release). Yes, it's very old and very specific, so I wouldn't want to install it on my main Windows. You can see why Managed DirectX was not very successful. Anyway, FractalPeaks should now be working, but to get the mouse fully operational make sure to turn mouse integration off.
It's not the best software in existence, but it's nice to play around with for a few minutes. Learning more about VirtualBox was about as much fun, but no doubt more useful.
Update (3 March 2012)
After getting version 0.1 of FractalPeaks going I remembered that I had actually created a much improved, but unreleased, version 0.2. After a bit of searching I found it, and shortly afterwards had it running. It's a shame it wasn't released, because it was a substantial improvement on the original. Here's the change log:
---==== Revisions ====---
version 0.2 (20-Mar-2006)
- updated to .Net Framework v2.0
- updated to Managed DirectX for .Net 2.0 (Feb 2006)
- changed keyboard controls to match google earth
- added nice backdrop
- added full screen mode (experimental)
- removed virtual selection box. Box now follows mouse cursor
- fixed selection box size
- reduced resource usage
version 0.1 (27-Feb-2005)
- Initial release
In summary, it's a lot faster, prettier and easier to control. However, the reason it wasn't released is the use of Managed DirectX for .Net 2.0 (Feb 2006). This was a beta release that never became official, so I had no official way to distribute the required runtimes.
To run FractalPeaks v0.2 I needed to install the specific DirectX indicated, which is still available for download from Microsoft - DirectX End-User Runtimes (February 2006) Full Download. Trying to run FractalPeaks now resulted in a message saying "This pre-release version of DirectX has expired, please upgrade to the latest version from http://www.microsoft.com/directx". I tried setting the time in my virtual machine to early 2006, but it kept resetting back to the current time. This is because VirtualBox automatically keeps the time in sync. Luckily you can specify an offset from the BIOS. This is in milliseconds, so I had to ask WolframAlpha for assistance, then altered my virtual machine using:
C:\Program Files\Oracle\VirtualBox>VBoxManage.exe modifyvm "Windows XP Clone" --
biossystemtimeoffset -194600000000
