Recently I installed a game from 1998, Micro Machines V3, on my Win 7 64-bit system. To my surprise, it ran seemingly flawlessly, and it even uses takes advantage of my ATI 5850 for Direct3D instead of simply running in software mode!

However, the one thing it does have problems with is the menu. Most of them are pitch black, meaning that I can still navigate them but I can't actually see what I'm doing. None of the compatibility settings seem to make a difference, and attempting to play the game in software mode will make it crash immediately after the intro. So, when it comes to choosing my car, the track, my savegame, etc. I'm completely blind.

What I then did was run the game in VMWare with Windows XP. The menus showed up, but I couldn't get Direct3D to work...so finally, I ran the game in VMWare on Windows 98 SE, except it turns out VMWare doesn't support Direct3D for Win 9x guests, which meant I ended up with software mode yet again.

I really want to find a way to get the best of Win 7 and Win XP, so I can enjoy the graphics while still being able to see what I'm doing in the menus.

Here are my system specs:
Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium
AMD Phenom II X4 B50 3.1 GHz
ATI HD5850 (Catalyst 11.4)
6 GB RAM