Good news to report on this!
I installed a fresh Windows 10 instance in VMWare Workstation, copied my FOTRS game directly into the guest VM, and it works like a charm! There is a
very slight bit of choppiness to some of the more graphical scenes, but it's very playable. Using the escape sequence of CTL-ALT to get out of the VM and use another program has no effect on the game's running instance. In fact, I'm writing this post as SH4 is running in my other window!
Here's my setup for replication. Some of the settings I put a bit higher than probably needed, but I wanted to get a smooth experience out of the game:
- VMWare Workstation 15.5 (should also work for VMWare Player)
- Win 10 Pro x64 Host/Guest
- 8GB RAM to the guest (Win10 is a hog...)
- 1 CPU/2 cores to guest
- 1GB of GPU/Video RAM (tried it initially with 2GB to minimize choppiness, but bumped it down to 1 when there was no noticeable difference)
Here's a screenshot of my success:
