Setting Up WordPress MS Locally with Port 8888 with XAMPP - wordpress

Question

I have installed XAMPP and edited the httpd.conf file because my port 80 is busy.
So I have the following:
Listen 0.0.0.0:8888
Servername localhost:8888
Everything works fine until I try to install WordPress 3.0.5 MS because it will not accept ports in the name.
So I have tried to add .htaccess file to my htdocs that contains:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^:8888/(.*)$ /$1 [L]
But that did not work.
So I have tried to create Virtual Hosts in httpd.conf adding the following at the bottom:
<Directory "C:/xampp/htdocs/www/wp.dev">
Order Deny,Allow
Allow from all
</Directory>
<Directory "C:/xampp/htdocs/">
Order Deny,Allow
Allow from all
</Directory>
NameVirtualHost 127.0.0.1:8888
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:8888>
DocumentRoot "C:/xampp/htdocs/"
ServerName localhost2
</VirtualHost>
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:8888>
DocumentRoot "C:/xampp/htdocs/www/wp.dev"
ServerName wp.dev
</VirtualHost>
And then I added the following to my hosts file (Help):
127.0.0.1:8888 localhost2
127.0.0.1:8888 wp.dev
And that hasn't worked. I cannot use port 80 as an option, so I need to figure this out. So what am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Unfortunately WordPress MS requires port 80 to work. You can check the requirements in this link
If using that port in your local machine is not an option for you, what you could consider is to work with a Virtual Machine. (This is the link to the BitNami WordPress virtual appliance in case you want to try it.)