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VMware and Games?

Posted by Cliff on from the working-around-the-limitations dept.

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?"

2 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. Have some cake by rubinson · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Next time on "Ask Slashdot": I really, really, REALLY want to have my cake and eat it too. Can someone help?

    Seriously, for things like this, you often have to make a choice. Sometimes it's a choice between your principles and your desires.

    You do have some options for MS-free gaming, most notably Wine and WineX. Or you could limit yourself to games that are available for Linux. TuxGames still has all (most?) of Loki's games available for sale. You could also move to OSX or console gaming.

    Or you could decide that your gaming is more important that having an MS-free desktop. And that's okay. What's important is that you decide what's important to you and then follow through on that. If supporting free/open source software is what's important to you, then losing some of your games will be a sacrifice - but, ultimately, it's one that you'll want to make. On the other hand, if gaming is what you want, then just go for it and don't feel guilty about it.

    As long as you're not shunning MS just to prove your eliteness...

  2. Partition. by saintlupus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I really, really, REALLY want to avoid having a Windows partition on my computer

    Why?

    It seems like you really, really, REALLY want to run Windows software. And you'll really, really, REALLY have to buy a Windows license anyway, whether you use VMWare or dual-boot.

    Is rebooting into the other OS really, really, REALLY such a hassle that you're willing to deal with the poor performance of VMWare?

    --saint