Grey screen on Windows 7 VM

I've been trying to figure out how to TAS cave story for a few days now and eventually I found someone who told me to use Hourglass and Cave Story on a Windows 7 Virtual machine. I was able to get hourglass onto the Windows 7 VM but Cave Story just gives me a gray screen and in-game audio. I tried using the DLL mod loader graphics enhancement but all that did was just make it so I get a loading screen then it crashes a few seconds later.

 

Hourglass only officially supports being run on Windows XP. You'll run into plenty of issues trying to run it on Windows 7. It honestly just sucks regardless of what you're running so good luck

 

I tried this with a windows xp vm but I when I tried to drag hourglass onto the vm it gave me a weird error, cave story was running fine though.

 

Try downloading and installing Hourglass within the VM itself rather than dragging and dropping it.

 

I cant get the internet to work on the vm

 

I may suggest downloading a winXP compatible version of firefox or chrome (i know they have those archived somewhere on their websites) through your main pc and then moving the installation files to your VM. Internet Explorer is very much dead.

 

I might be wrong but this looks like an issue with connecting to the internet, rather than something browser-specific. Plus, I mean, this is basically a simulation of an era where IE worked fine, right?
@clownguy Considering this isn't a Cave Story problem per se, you might want to try asking on some support forum for VirtualBox, about how to get the drag and drop operation (or network connectivity) to work.