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VMware and Games?
gunnk asks: "Here's the deal: I really, really, REALLY want to avoid having a Windows partition on my computer, but I have some nifty games that I still want to play (particularly Civ III). I own a copy of VMware, but Civ3 coughs up an error telling me I'm running a debugger and need to unload it when I try to start the game. All this seems to come up due to copy protection in games. Someone asked something like this over at WINE and was told to grab a copy of the exe without the protection via gamecopyworld. That didn't work for me either (didn't run). Anyone finding any reliable ways to run these games without a Windows partition?"
If you have enough RAM, then non-audio and -video performance are probably just as good as you get running natively. But like you said, the VMWare video drivers *suck*. Whereas I can play a full-screen movie in Linux or native Windows with 5-10% CPU usage, trying the same inside VMWare skips every other frame. The VMWare audio wrapper is even less efficient, taking up most of my 1.4GHz CPU just to play an MP3 and skipping if I try to do anything else concurrently.
For games, VMWare does not support any type of DirectX hardware acceleration at all (do they even support DirectX in any configuration?). So don't even think about trying to play a 3D game. I tried Quake3 once, just to see, and it crashed the VM hard.
WineX will eventually support Civ III. Link here to Civ III shows that it is partially working. I'm guessing the next release will probably fix the font alignment problems; thus moving the rating from 2/5 to 3/5.
As far as cost is concerned, winex is alot cheaper than vmware. You get a small say in how the development is directed along with the use of winex.
--- its to bad about the monkey, I kinda liked them