I've always loved Midtown Madness. It's an open world driving game where you can race while wrecking the place. What's NOT to love about that. However, there was a problem as we moved to later hardware and newer Windows releases where compatilibty could be a hit or miss. What was this problem: Midtown Madness didn't like virtualizers. Now, Midtown Madness didn't have a issue playing any virtualizer when the game was configured for software mode. However, has anyone seen Midtown Madness running in software mode? The game looks hideous in software mode. Granted, when I first played Midtown Madness, it was through software mode as the computers that I played the game on only had SVGA chipsets. However, we're now on systems that have 3D acceleration. Virtual machines now have 3D acceleration as well. Yet, Midtown Madness flipped out when running on any virtualizer with 3D acceleration enabled.

I finally found a setup where the original game mostly works. It's on a VMware Player setup running 32-bit Windows 7 guest with 3D acceleration enabled. However, since then, I've learned about Open1560. Open1560 is basically an open-source implementation of Midtown Madness. Well, it is but not quite. It's an open-source re-implementation of the Midtown Madness Sneak Preview Beta/Build 1560 but using the OpenGL Graphics API to allow the game to run on new platforms not supported by the original. In a way, Open1560 is to Midtown Madness what Open Rails is to Microsoft Train Simulator, it's a brand-new open-source implantation of a older game engine to allow old game files to work on much newer platforms.

With that said, Build 1560 is by all intensive purposes close enough to the retail to be a replacement for the base game. In fact, the engine cannot function without the base game files, which are required. From there, one can get all the Midtown Madness rampaging that they want, and it runs without issue on the 32-bit Windows 7 guest (and probably later versions of Windows as well).

VMware Player 17 is virtualizing a multimedia PC with a single core allocated to it (AMD Ryzen 5 5500 6-Core Host with each core running at 4.2GHz), 2GB's of RAM, VESA Compatible display adapter with 3D acceleration enabled. Windows is running at the screen resolution of 1024 by 768, 32-bit color depth. VMware Player is configured with a HD Audio Device and an Intel PRO/1000MT Network Adapter. Windows 7 SP1 is installed with a Win98 theme applied to it (copied from the Microsoft Plus!98 files that were copied from a Win98 installation), along with Open-Shell.

If you want to know more about the Open1560 project, you can check out the link here:
https://github.com/0x1F9F1/Open1560

Songs Used:
Ditch Diggin' By
Jingle Punks
Finland By TrackTribe
Once By Silent Partner
YouTube Audio Library

Software Used:
Recorded With OBS Studio
Composed In Kdenlive

Hardware Used:
PC equipped with a
AMD Ryzen 5 5500 CPU
6 Cores Running At 4.2GHz
AMD Radeon RX570 GPU
Windows 11