Doobleshaft: I have had the same problems mentioned here with Alpha Centauri and sometimes manage to get the virtual memory error.
A recommended patch stopped it from shutting down but caused a problem I found with other versions of the game (I only play Alien Crossfire) where it starts but immediately says the sea levels are rising. It keeps saying that every turn (which is a pain) and that's all it does.
For the virtual memory fault, I have managed to stop this from occurring with changes to the virtual memory settings. But then it defaults to the sea level rising problem.
On one computer I've managed to back out of 24H2 and the game works normally again. But on my laptop I cannot do this and would have to re-install yet again.
I'd be interested in any changes that anyone has managed to implement to fix parts of the problem to see if I can work out whether anything such as patches, config changes etc.at least fixes part of the issue.
I have the same two problems as others.
Alien Crossfire does run in a virtual machine. But on my rig anyway that seems to be painfully slow.
[EDIT] It runs beautifully in a Windows XP Virtual Machine under VirtualBox. However the new Windows Sandbox feature in 24H2 killed the performance of this virtual machine for me. Once I turned off Windows Sandbox, I again get near native performance in my VM -- Windows Sandbox turns on a subset of Hyper-V which is known to interfere with VirtualBox VMs.
I can work around the virtual memory crash by starting a new game in a virtual machine, saving, then opening this save on my desktop. However then I get forced into multiplayer mode.
Since MS changed the WOW64 emulator in 24h2, likely the easiest fix would be to figure out how to run thru Wine on Windows -- the same fix that enabled 16 bit apps to run on 64 bit Windows.
https://github.com/otya128/winevdm However the 0.9.0 version of winevdm won't run terranx -- it says its a 32 bit app already. [EDIT] Or port Proton to Windows as it works great under Proton in Linux.