VR Sports Powerboat Racing - anyone got Direct3D working on

[VirtuaIceMan]

VR Sports Powerboat Racing by Interplay... when you fire it up you can choose between "Primary Display Driver" (i.e. Direct3D, it uses DX6 or 6.1 I believe) or "Software Only". Even on my Win8.1 64bit machine "Software Only" mode works fine, but it's limited to 320x240 so is SUPER blocky!

Has anyone ever got the 3D version working? I seem to remember it working on my ancient Win98 machine with a Voodoo5 card, but it doesn't work on my WinXP 32bit with Nvidia 7800GS+ graphics, and doesn't on my new PC either.

Basically when you choose the "Primary Display Driver", it launches a full screen window called "Powerboat Racing", then after a few seconds, the mouse pointer vanishes. If you alt-tab you can then see there's an error message about "DDraw Error: Unable to open screen", with a button to close the game.

Anyone got any ideas?