I’m not sure this is the right place for my question. Any hints for a
better suited newsgroup are gladly accepted.
I’m running openSUSE 10.3 as my principal work environment and have
installed VirtualBox 1.6.2 non-OSE for the occasional need of running
Microsoft Windows. This is generally working quite well.
Now I have received the Windows game “Dreamfall” as a birthday present
and would of course like to run it in VirtualBox too, but have so far
not succeeded in doing so.
First I tried with an existing Windows 2000 VM which had been working
well. I increased the limits on main and graphics memory to what the
requirements on the game’s box said, mapped the physical DVD-ROM drive
into the VM, and successfully installed the game, but on every attempt
to start it, the VM would become completely unresponsive so nothing
but VirtualBox’s “Machine Reset” command would work. After the third
try the VM was so damaged it wouldn’t even come up in Safe Mode anymore.
I then made a new VM with Windows XP Professional to which I gave the
memory required by the game, plus 50% safety margin, from the beginning.
Again, the game installed fine, but every attempt to start it resulted
in a bluescreen either followed by an automatic restart or, when I
switched off Windows’ “restart after crash” option, a VirtualBox error:
24:19:09.951 Trying to execute code with memory type addr_code=f75c7020 addend=00000000011b8000 at f75c7ce8! (iHandlerMemType=0x70 iMMIOMemType=0x60)
My guess is the game’s copy protection is deliberately or accidentally
playing havoc with VirtualBox. Any ideas on how to get around that?
Is there a special reason that you didn’t use Wine to run that game? Dreamfall is marked in Wine’s AppDB as fully functional without any patches (see Wine AppDB - Dreamfall: The Longest Journey 1.0).
Chrysantine wrote:
> ‘GameCopyWorld - Dreamfall: The Longest Journey 2 - NoCD No-CD No-DVD
> Trainers & Game Fixes’ (http://tinyurl.com/59j75t)
Thanks for that pointer. Unfortunately the first patch I tried from that
page (the one for the German version, as that’s what I have) didn’t
help much - trying to start the game no longer crashes the VM, but pops
up an error message:
“No usefull (sic!) screenmodes found or not correct DirectX version. Aborting.”
DxDiag tells me DirectX 9.0c is working fine, though. But of course the
VirtualBox Virtual Graphics Adapter is not in the game’s list of
supported graphics cards, so I cannot complain.
tian b schrieb:
> Is there a special reason that you didn’t use Wine to run that game?
Just that I don’t have any positive experience with Wine so far.
I tried it a couple of years ago when it was less mature than it is
apparently today, got nowhere and returned to my dual-boot installation.
After the recent enormous progress in virtualization I replaced that
first wich XEN HVM and then with VirtualBox which so far works like a
charm. So my personal experience has flagged Wine as “difficult” and
VirtualBox as “easy”.
Tilman Schmidt schrieb:
> tian b schrieb:
>
>> Dreamfall is marked in Wine’s AppDB as fully functional without any
>> patches (see ‘Wine AppDB - Dreamfall: The Longest Journey 1.0’
>> (http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=5305)).
>
> Interesting. I’ll read up on Wine then and try that.
Hmm, I’m probably doing something stupid but I can’t get it to work.
I installed wine-0.9.44-15 from the openSUSE 10.3 OSS repository and
tried the test of running “wine notepad.exe” in a console window as
proposed in the file README.SuSE, which succeeded in putting up a
Notepad window except the menu fonts were unreadable blurs and a lot
of messages “To use WINEPS you need to install some AFM files.”
appeared in the console window. Googling that message led me to
believe it only concerned printing, so I ignored it.
I inserted the Dreamfall DVD, which got automounted as /media/DREAMFALL
and ran “wine /media/DREAMFALL/setup.exe” from a console window to
install it. The installation dialog appeared fine but after starting
the installation, a DirectX installation wizard window appeared which
was again rendered in the same unreadable font as Notepad in the test.
I clicked through that blindly, and on the first attempt it just hung
after clicking what might have been the final finish button. Killing
the processes started by Wine left zombie processes and didn’t get
rid of the hanging installer windows so I restarted my X server (ie. I
logged off and on again.)
On the second attempt the installation went through and put an icon
“Dreamfall - The Longest Journey” on my desktop which looks
conspicuously like a glass of red champagne. If I double-click that,
there is another dialog box with those unreadable blur fonts popping
up, named “Schutz-System (Pro)” (“Protection System (Pro)”) according
to the taskbar and sporting three buttons labeled with blurs that
might possibly be meant to read “Ja” (yes), “Nein” (no) and something
longer I cannot even guess at. Clicking the latter has no effect,
while clicking either of the first two just closes the window, end of
story.
Tilman Schmidt schrieb:
> On the second attempt the installation went through and put an icon
> “Dreamfall - The Longest Journey” on my desktop which looks
> conspicuously like a glass of red champagne. If I double-click that,
> there is another dialog box with those unreadable blur fonts popping
> up, named “Schutz-System (Pro)” (“Protection System (Pro)”) according
> to the taskbar and sporting three buttons labeled with blurs that
> might possibly be meant to read “Ja” (yes), “Nein” (no) and something
> longer I cannot even guess at. Clicking the latter has no effect,
> while clicking either of the first two just closes the window, end of
> story.
Additional info: running the “Dreamfall” icon’s starter command in a
console window gives a lot of “fixme” messages followed by two “err”
messages, like so:
tian b schrieb:
> Is there a special reason that you didn’t use Wine to run that game?
> Dreamfall is marked in Wine’s AppDB as fully functional without any
> patches (see ‘Wine AppDB - Dreamfall: The Longest Journey 1.0’
> (http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=5305)).
My own experiments lead me to conclude that this entry is wrong.
Dreamfall refuses to run under Wine, the culprit apparently
being, as usual, the copy protection mechanism.
tian b schrieb:
> Is there a special reason that you didn’t use Wine to run that game?
> Dreamfall is marked in Wine’s AppDB as fully functional without any
> patches (see ‘Wine AppDB - Dreamfall: The Longest Journey 1.0’
> (http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=5305)).
My own experiments lead me to conclude that this entry is wrong.
Dreamfall refuses to run under Wine, the culprit apparently
being, as usual, the copy protection mechanism.
