Getting the new MMORPG Runes of Magic to run. Please read if you are an experienced VMware user!

[moniec15]

Ok, so here is what I'm working with:

Macbook 4,1; 10.56; 4GB ram; X3100 GPU; VMware Fusion (VMwF) 2.0.2; another pc emulator (I will call it CxG) 7.02 (latest)

Problem:

Running this game in win2k, winxp, and vista bottles via CxG yeild this:

The sound is excellent, there is no lag, but it seems the 3D images are missing (the trees, rocks, and water). This is the initial screen where you log-in.

Here are my win reg configs for each bottle:

Now, when I run this game via VMwF (emulating vista home premium), the screen is initially black for about 5 min., music plays fine, there are extremely large amounts of lag (my entire laptop slows down ridiculously), but then you see it. It is the initial EULA screen, except the box that is supposed to contain the EULA agreement is blank. The option to "agree" or "cancel" is there, and can be clicked, but the lag is so great that when I click either one, nothing seems to happen.

Take Aways:

It seems that the CxG emulation is smoother, but lacks the 3D rendering capabilities. Whilst the VMwF has the 3D rendering capabilities, but lacks the smoothness.

If there were some way to find out the difference in how CxGames and VMwF is running this game, and try and find some middle road that utilizes the smoothness of CxGames and what ever VMwF is using to render that 3D image, maybe we may have a means of getting this game to run.

Solution:

I am just a gamer. I troubleshoot client problems for both PCs and Macs part time, so I am no PC/Mac newb. If anyone out there has any idea how to go about tweaking CxG or VMwF to get this program to run, I am sure I speak for all of us out there that would like to see this game on a non-Windows OS when I say, PLEASE HELP US!

What I already know, so please dont bother to mention:

X3100 might not support this game. On a windows machine with latest drivers it does, and there is no reason to believe that it wont on my mac with latest drivers (I have done lots of searching around the web and have found no conclusive evidence proving it will or wont run).

I know I can run this via bootcamp fine.

Thanks in advanced!

[admin]

x3100s don't support all the OpenGL functions we use to accelerate 3D graphics, and there should have been a warning about this when you powered on the virtual machine. Even though the game may run in Boot Camp (so the hardware may technically be capable of running the game), Fusion uses different code paths on a different driver so that datapoint is not very useful.

I would also not expect it to be easy to make use of CxG's work, both from a legal standpoint and from a technical standpoint (our approaches are probably fairly different).

[moniec15]

Thanks for the quick response!

Is there a way to tweak VWware or update/change the driver or code paths VMware uses so as to be able to address the X3100 issue? I know the hardware (X3100) can run the game, and am aware that the apple drivers for my GPU are behind the ones made available for PCs via Intel's website, but I am wondering is there a way for a program like VMware to treat the hardware on my laptop in the same manner the intel drivers from Intel's website would. To essentially emulate the drivers.

I thought I could just download the new drivers, run VMware, then manually update the video drivers. I learned (and correct me if I am wrong) that this is not possible because VMware isnt actually looking at my hardware, but going based off emulated hardware. If this is the case, is there a way to make VMware actually look at my hardware, or get it to emulate hardware and/or drivers so as to use my GPU to its full potential?

[RDPetruska]

>is there a way to make VMware actually look at my hardware

No, this is not possible. To solve your problem, complain to Apple to update/fix their drivers for your host's video card. Until they hear enough customers complain, they probably aren't going to do anything about it.

[moniec15]

Thanks for the input, but this solution seems more far fetched than trying to see if VMwF has a work around to this driver issue. People have been complaining to apple about the X3100 for a very long time. So have I in fact. So while the ideal solution to this problem would be simply asking Apple to update the drivers, and them actually doing it in a timely manner, the likelihood of this happening before someone out there finds a work around is something I put little hope in.

I have been in contact with some really amazing people of the wine community, and some of them think that this isnt just a driver issue, but has something to do with opengl. I dont know much about these things, but I think they might be able to figure out a way to get games such as Runes of Magic (which utilize directx 9c, shader 2.0, and some form of opengl I dont know much about) to run on systems similar to my Macbook 4,1.

Since it is impossible to get VMwF to actually look at my hardware, is there a way for it to immulate hardware and/or drivers for hardware that exceed my current hardware? If it isn't looking at the real hardware, why cant we tell VMwF to pretend the OS environment it is emulating has a GPU and drivers that support (or exceed) the graphic demands of games such as RoM?

[admin]

See : Virtual Hardware.

The point of virtualization is not just to present hardware to a guest, it's to present hardware that can run quickly to the guest. Yes, you could tell the guest it has every single spiffy feature of the most modern graphics card and then compute everything in software, but it would be horribly, horribly, unusably slow. Also, this plan doesn't work too well if the host is incorrectly rendering things in software - you're asking us to reimplement a modern graphics card (which would be out of date before we even got to the testing phase) entirely in software, and on top of that not using existing host instructions because the drivers may be buggy. This does not seem reasonable.

RDPetruska: Somewhat understandably, Apple does not seem to be interested in fixing bugs in graphics cards that are no longer shipping. They've dropped integrated graphics such as the x3100 and have moved to discrete cards in all Macs (which would work better with our 3D acceleration).

[RDPetruska]

RDPetruska: Somewhat understandably, Apple does not seem to be interested in fixing bugs in graphics cards that are no longer shipping.

To me, this is yet another piece of evidence of Apple's stance that they don't care about their users, do not know how to run a company, and one of the biggest reasons I will never buy a single thing they sell.