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?"

Comments

Have some cake

[rubinson]

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...

Re:Sorry

[big_hairy_mama]

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.

Partition.

[saintlupus]

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

Re:Eh, Maybe It'll Work, Maybe Not

[swillden]

I can use a scanner in a VM running Windows XP that Linux itself doesn't have a driver for -- how whacked is that? :)

Not that whacked. Try this one:

My company provides me with a VPN client for when I'm on the road. It has two modes; it can act as a modem dialer or it can run over a regular network connection (it uses IPSec in either case). There is no Linux version, only windows.

So, when I want to dial in, I fire up Win2K in VMWare and run the dialer. It talks through a virtual serial port to my Lucent winmodem (for which I have Linux drivers) and dials in. Cool, my VMWare session has connectivity to the corporate network. But I want Linux to have that as well. No problem, I configure Win2K to do "connection sharing" (aka NAT) and configure Linux to use the VMWare "box" as it's default route. If you don't think that's whacked draw a little diagram of the data flow :)

But what about when I'm on a LAN? A little iptables magic and my Linux box acts as a nice little NATing router for the Windows "box" (yes, VMWare can do it's own NAT automatically, but iptables is to that as a swiss army knife is to a letter opener). I fire up the VPN software and then the Windows "box" has an encrypted tunnel to the corporate network, routed through Linux. But I want Linux to have access as well! Okay, here's how: give the Win2K "box" another host-only virtual network adapter, on a different private subnet. Then configure connection sharing on the virtual adapter that's being routed through Linux. Then configure Linux to route outbound connections to the corporate network to the Windows "box" over the "non-shared" connection. Voila!

But many of the LANs I connect to have firewalls that can't deal with IPSec (which is a problem with the firewall software, not, in most cases anyway, a configuration choice by the admin). So, I create an IP over IP tunnel (through some other protocol that will pass the firewall) to my server at home, which routes the tunneled IPSEC packets to my corporate VPN server (and back). It's amusing when I'm at a client site with a team and I'm the only one that can get access to the VPN. I haven't yet had the opportunity, but I expect one of these days I'll end up providing NAT services to teammates' Windows machines to give them access to the VPN. Draw a picture of that and tell me it doesn't curl your toes! The most difficult part is getting permission from the client to do it. They always think that anything that weird must be breaking their security policies in some way.

Although it's not quite as whacked as the networking, I also have a handheld device with an IR interface. Only Windows software exists for it, and that software won't work on Win2K because Microsoft discontinued support for the IRCOMM protocol, and that's all the software will use. Actually, the software really only knows how to use a serial port, but under, for example, Win98 you could create a virtual serial port that actually talked IRCOMM over the IR interface. I don't want to use Win98. So, I configure my IR port to use IRCOMM under Linux and associate it with a serial port (/dev/ttyS1, actuall). Then I configure VMWare to expose /dev/ttyS1 as a serial port under Win2K. The software that talks to the handheld runs just fine under Win2K, as long as it's talking over an ordinary serial port. Well, as far as Win2K knows, it is; Linux handles the translation to IRCOMM.

Linux + VMWare running windows also makes a great USB debugging/reverse engineering tool. Just hack the Linux USB drivers to log all of the messages and then install the windows drivers in a VMWare session and go to town.

There's all kinds of whacked out stuff you can do with VMWare :-)