Run Dispel (1999) on Windows 8.1

I want to play Dispel on rather modern PC: Windows 8.1 (x64), Intel i5-3570k, Radeon r9 380. This is an old game (1999) and unpopular, so it was never remastered or even patched for systems, that are newer then XP. It's really buggy also, so it may have hardware problems because of using dirty hacks instead of normal video driver API. Nevertheless, it requires DirectX 7. If I try to run the game as administrator (otherwise it won't work), I get "Cannot install driver" message. The same problem in every compatibility mode. If I try to launch Dispel under Windows XP in Oracle VM Virtualbox, I get another error: "The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005)." This happens regardless on 2D/3D acceleration enabled. What other tricks can I try (excluding installing XP in dualboot)? Can I get some information about the error with any kind of debugger (for example, which particular library initialization failed)?