Quake under XP in Virtualbox

[golden_boy]

In darkplaces, I have to set sensitivity to 0.05 to make the mouse usable, after setting -dinput. Without -dinput, the mouse was just chaotic. I tried to disable the mouse acceleration in the "System controls" (no idea what that is in English) but it didn't do anything... The mouse is also often confined to like a 90 degree angle, ie the size of the fov. Which means I can't turn more than 45 degrees to either side. It runs in principle, though.

When I run Qrack 1.90, *everything* turns white. The menu is usable though, even though I can't see it... -no8bit does nothing.

DirectQ pops up a box saying "Direct3Dsomething: No fullscreen RGB modes found", and then says "Unknown error".

RMQ engine runs, but again everything is white, this time I can see the contours though. Again -no8bit does nothing. Mouse fucked again.

So much for my adventures in Virtualbox land. Does anyone have experience with running Quake in a Windows guest system?

I'm guessing VB lets Quake access the host's video hardware, which in the case of DP definitely works. Which makes me think those are Windows problems. It's XP Pro service pack 2.

I like Windows already.

[Skutarth]

In darkplaces, I have to set sensitivity to 0.05 to make the mouse usable, after setting -dinput. Without -dinput, the mouse was just chaotic. I tried to disable the mouse acceleration in the "System controls" (no idea what that is in English) but it didn't do anything... The mouse is also often confined to like a 90 degree angle, ie the size of the fov. Which means I can't turn more than 45 degrees to either side. It runs in principle, though.

When I run Qrack 1.90, *everything* turns white. The menu is usable though, even though I can't see it... -no8bit does nothing.

DirectQ pops up a box saying "Direct3Dsomething: No fullscreen RGB modes found", and then says "Unknown error".

RMQ engine runs, but again everything is white, this time I can see the contours though. Again -no8bit does nothing. Mouse fucked again.

So much for my adventures in Virtualbox land. Does anyone have experience with running Quake in a Windows guest system?

I'm guessing VB lets Quake access the host's video hardware, which in the case of DP definitely works. Which makes me think those are Windows problems. It's XP Pro service pack 2.

I like Windows already.

VirtualBox's 3D acceleration is still experimental. You would know that if you read any of the warnings it gave when you enabled it. OpenGL, because of its open nature, works relatively well. Direct3D is proprietary and its acceleration is even more experimental.

Why are you running it in VirtualBox anyway? There are plenty of ports for both Linux distros and MacOS. If you're running Linux, I would suggest running it in Wine if none of the Linux builds are running well for you.

No virtual machine these days is built for gaming. The only exception I can think of is possibly running VMWare natively with the guest operating system running on it, but I haven't test that myself.

[golden_boy]

I know all these things. I was just thinking someone might actually have some ideas how to fix it up, or experience with a similar setup.

[MH]

I test regularly in an XP Pro guest running in VMWare player and both OpenGL and D3D work flawlessly. VMWare's video driver is definitely a superior piece of work and is capable of supporting all features of the host driver (occasionally with better performance!) even without hardware virtualisation. Performance is roughly on a par with what I get using Linux natively (native Windows gets about 3x the performance; this is likely a driver issue rather than an OS issue though), no special configration required or anything; just let the VMWare additions install and everything works.

Host OS is Windows 7 with an Intel 4 Series thing video chip.

There are a number of factors here, including choice of host OS, choice of VM software, underlying hardware, possibly even phases of the moon. I'd guess that there are a number of "magic combinations" where everything just clicks together and works perfectly, and maybe also some "not-so-magic combinations" (I've had nothing but pain and suffering trying to get any kind of hardware acceleration using a Linux guest, for example).

VMWare may be proprietary, but the Player software is free of charge and can create as well as host VMs, and the quality of it's video driver alone is worth letting some proprietary software into the house.

[Phenom]

3D acceleration in VirtualBox (including OSE) is not recommended. Just nag R00k to make Qrack 1.90 for Linux!

[golden_boy]

Thanks mh, I might try that. I guess I didn't listen properly when you said that the first time :-)

[R00k]

3D acceleration in VirtualBox (including OSE) is not recommended. Just nag R00k to make Qrack 1.90 for Linux!

I know, I have Kubuntu installed on my other machine. I never have time for anything anymore sheez! I need to first implement SDL into Qrack, then migrate to Linux.

[Spirit]

You need to disable Mouse Integration if you want to game properly in VirtualBox.

Qrack 1.90 runs fine for me. Are you using ATI?
DirectQ has the same error like you. Doesn't it need some newer DirectX than Wine supports?
d3dpro488.exe errors. gl works.
Fitzquake 0.85 works well.

[MH]

The D3DX (like GLU but for D3D) DLLs that ship with Wine are in a disgraceful state. Most functions are only implemented as stubs and failing gracefully (or even failing noisily but in accordance with the documentation) just doesn't happen. I have got DirectQ working on Wine, but only by copying the actual real D3DX DLLs (and maybe a few others like the shader compiler) from a Windows installation over. D3DX is just a pure software library that wraps some D3D calls for you so this can be done and it works.

For DirectQ you should be using a version of the D3DX DLLs that shipped with at least the April 2008 Direct3D release. These aren't included by default on Vista or 7 installations, by the way. This is a major source of confusion - "I have D3D10 so why should I need to upgrade my D3D9?" - but D3D9 actually has recieved many updates since the original releases of both D3D10 and 11; despite the version numbers thing, 10 or 11 are actually completely different APIs and don't include functionality from 9. It's been set up to optionally use earlier or later versions, and later ones work fine but earlier ones might be playing with fire a little.

If Sun VirtualBox is ultimately going through Wine for it's D3D emulation this will be a problem with not just DirectQ but also with any D3D application (Mass Effect 2 has a similar requirement, for example).

[golden_boy]

OK, this seems to actually be the case. Virtualbox uses WineD3D to provide D3D support ...

This means that Windows games will actually run better under wine than under a Windows guest system in virtualbox. Stupid.

I might try dual booting for gaming then. Sigh.