VMWare Player is too small on Windows 10! Also what is 1036521??

So I have to setup a new machine for someone, and going the VMWare route for some essential bits (Running ESXi) it turns out that every VM I try to run gives me this fun error 1036521.

Great

VMware Workstation unrecoverable error: (vcpu-0). vcpu-0:VERIFY vmcore/vmm/main/cpuid.c:382 bugNr=1036521

What the heck is this?  It sure could have been made a little more legible but it means that your BIOS needs to have the hardware assist turned on for virtualization.  This kind of thing just reminds me so much of OS/2 and it’s SYSXXXX errors from back in the day.

Speaking of, once VMWare was running the display was incredibly tiny.  This image really doesn’t do it justice, but it’s frankly impossible to read.

What is this? An emulator for ants?

There isn’t much in the way of help for VMWare Player (aka freeloader) version users, however some playing around and I found an acceptable solution.

All too easy, of course once you know where to look

Simply find the shortcut’s location and jump to the compatibility tab, and set the “Override high DPI scaling to “System (Enhanced)”, hit OK and you are now good to go!

VMWare for humans

Now you can actually read what is going on.  Also for anyone who cares, MS OS/2 1.21 really should be on a 100MB disk or so.. large disks & VMWare’s IDE don’t play along so well.

6 thoughts on “VMWare Player is too small on Windows 10! Also what is 1036521??

  1. VMWare Workstation has the same problem on High DPI, and while turning on DPI scaling overriding makes the picture larger, it completely messes up mouse in the guest.

    I wonder if Workstation 14 fixes this. VirtualBox has two ways of scaling guest display – fixed percentage, or by having the guest display scale to window, either of these would be nice to have in VMWare.

    • I haven’t tried the mouse! I was so fixated on just being able to read it…

      I guess the real solution is to forget 4k+++ screens and drop back to 1920×1080 or so..

      • I actually switched to VirtualBox for a lot of my testing, because despite it having worse graphic driver, the ability to scale guest display makes it more usable than Workstation.

        And I’d never return to regular DPI now – text is so nice on 5k 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.