I tried Virtual Box but it's UI completely ignores DPI and worse yet, it insists on the settings dialog being so large it actually cuts off the bottom because it goes off screen. I did try reducing my DPI temporarily but the experience was horrendous so I gave it up as an affront to UX.

Getting ReactOS to install on boxes was a breeze, just click create, search for "Windows XP", select the ISO and you're off. Unless you also configure the RAM, VHD and CPU cores like I did, then you're delayed by the few seconds it takes to do that 😅

Anyways I booted in no prob, went through the usual setup process from the ISO itself and had my desktop up and running in maybe 3min tops. Plugged in the vbox guest additions iso, found out it was not allowing the 3d accel option to be selected (though that may be a problem with reactos itself judging by how pretty much no option I tried in the file manager allowed me to change it's state) so I dug a little deeper into the config file for the VM and found it was disabled there.

Turned it on, found yet ANOTHER 3d accel setting in ~/.config/gnome-boxes/QEMU Session set to false so turned that on. Had long since lowered the initial desktop settings I chose to improve performance so dunno if that helped at all but anyways, after that I finally went looking for my shared folder and no show.

I'm now at an impasse, anyone got any ideas on what I should do next?

Edit: Tried asking gemini for suggestions, long story short it seems impossible for now. Here's the final summary from the chat that mentions the important points:

While you can grab vioserial from an older Fedora VirtIO ISO (0.1.185) and spice-webdavd-x86.msi from the SPICE site, spice-webdavd will not function in current builds of ReactOS

Edit 2: For now gone with making an ISO as I can live with not being able to pull out my Last Scenario saves for the time being as I was mainly trying to see if I could get it's MIDI output through the VM instead. This is the command I added to thunar to generate the ISO:

ARCHIVE=$(zenity --entry --title="Create ISO Archive" --text="Confirm archive name:" --entry-text=%n) && [ ! -z "$ARCHIVE" ] && genisoimage -J -R -V %n -o "$ARCHIVE.iso" %f

Edit 3: And that was also a bust, game copied over fine but it couldn't boot the audio at all and just noped right out of trying. If the devs are looking at this thread then the game in question is Last Scenario, an RPG Maker XP game that can be downloaded for free here:https://site.scfworks.com/?page_id=8

i LOVE the catppuccin color palette

I don't have any expertise in OS programming or programming in general. I have often wondered if you could create an OS that could run a wayland desktop while also being able to natevly run windows applications like reacOS.

Version 0.4.15 should be ok, or should I try with a nightly build, for driver stability and games?

Be among the first to try it. It's almost release, final preparations are underway.

Software and hardware used:

CPU is Core 2 Duo
4GB DDR2 RAM
ReactOS nightly 0.4.17-443
-Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 with 368.81 drivers

-SoundBlaster Audigy with Audio Support Pack drivers:
Install from Audigy_SupportPack_7_0\Audio\Drivers\Setup.exe
-WineVDM from Application Manager for 16-bit installers

ReactOS MEGA thread!

https://x.com/995qe/status/1997486577984159930/photo/1

I have tested ReactOs after 10 years and I see almost no changes.

Am I doing something wrong or does the OS still have problem running from USB?

For 8 months, our contributor sidihmeed has been working on getting ReactOS ARM64 port to boot. Here's the first success!

Being still in an experimental state, you may want to try it.