3D game query - "Leisure Suit Larry MCL" Maybe the hardware t & l requirement?

[Eck]

I'd love to occasionally load up the "Leisure Suit Larry Magna C - m Laude" game on my pc. I recently went with a Debian Lenny 32 bit only install, choosing to just use Windows in VM's.

I've got VMWare WS 6.5.1 installed on the Debian Lenny host with XP SP3 as the guest. I noticed that 3D wasn't available with the radeon open source driver since it only has openGL 1.3, xo I installed the latest ATI Catalysts (terminal, had it build Debian/Lenny packages, installed the deb's with dpkg -i, put holds in aptitude on the 3 packages it wants to update to the lenny repo older versions, ran aticonfig --initial, reboot, set amdcccle to overide app settings with 2X anti-sampling, and all 3D works fine). I would have used the Debian repo versions but the latest ones have fixed a lot of things so I just went aod got those.

This game was even a problem for some users with older cards because of its hardware T & L requirement and the DX9 pixel shader 2.0 requirement, but my card (ATI Radeon x850 PRO) plays the game fine in either XP or 98SE.

On my guest now, the game starts, the in-game configurator recognizes my Logitech Rumblepad 2 and reports no trouble, and the initial movie screens and game start screen run fine. The "New Game" selection runs the first time movie, and then the game loading screen loads up the first screen fine.

That's when the crash occurs. The first screen of the game appears. I can see everything, but then a Windows Error message pops up saying the game has performed an illegal operation and must be shut down. I hit no to sending an error to Microsoft (heh, heh), and the game closes itself.

Sound and Video work through all that, until that first game part where it wants to tutor you around. It appears, the error box appears and the game is paused until I hit no to sending the report and the game just closes.

I've attempted setting the game to different screen resolutions and also attempted setting it to both windowed and window-no edges modes. I also attempted using Exclusive Mode in the guest. Any of this results in the same thing. The game runs until that point where I can actually begin playing it.

I'm actually glad I installed the Catalysts since stuff on Linux like the Mupen64Plus emulator and its Glide64 plugin also perform better with the openGL 2.1 than the 1.3 that the radeon drivers offer. But it looks like in order for this game to work, at this point, I'd need to dual-boot, eh?

Any thoughts as to whether I'm right, that it's probably the hardware T & L requirement? Any idea as to if that isn't the problem, what could I do to get the game to work? Anyone even have this game to test? Heh, heh.

Wine (latest development version) doesn't like the game either. It passes the cd test and then puts up a black screen and then crashes immediately. (Trys to open the initial movie and fails.) Got it installed by Wine in Debian by copying all the cd's to a folder (skipping the files that repeat on each cd) and running setup from the folder). Guess it's too tough for Wine too. There's a winehq db article on it, and that guy somehow had the game running, but poorly. Much older version of Wine though, at the time of his test.

Just wondering how much Direct 3D we actually get on VMWare. And if it has that hardware T & L thing that has broken the back of several folks who used to post on the VUGames Siorra forum about their troubles.

Edit - By the way, dxdiag ran its Direct 3D and Direct Draw stuff just fine in my guest. So the VMWare 3D is working. Tools installed and running fine and all.

Message was edited by: Eck

[IamTHEvilONE]

Eck,

Please be aware that there is some implementation of 3D acceleration, basically on par with Direct X 9.0c. However, the actual video card recognized in any guest is still the VMware SVGA adapter and ensure that the 3D acceleration is enabled in the virtual machine's settings.

However, not all 3D games will run in a guest because of specific requirements of the application. I haven't personally put MCL in a virtual machine, hopefully someone can try this on their own if they still have a copy of that.

Regards,

EvilOne

1 - Check the documents

2 - Search the forums

3 - Post Question

And remember to award points to those who assist you.

[hstagner]

Hello Eck,

There is also a VMware doc that lists the games that work under Fusion. I know you are not using Fusion, but WS 6.5 3D support is probably close.

I hope this helps.

Don't forget to use the buttons on the side to award points if you found this useful (you'll get points too).

Regards,

Harley Stagner

[Eck]

Hmm, interesting place here, with all the button pushing and "Question answered?" queries. It hasn't really been answered, I guess, until some folks possibly better at tinkering try the game out and see how far they can get with nudging it to begin actual play.

But I did push the buttons for nice and helpful replies!

Is this THE Evil One who used to put together all those nice Creative soundcard driver packages? Small world, this internet, eh? Used your packages all the time in the old days, if that's you.

That's also a very helpful list of games and how they react on VMWare.

I know we're using the virtualized card in the guest. I just wondered how much it can virtualize stuff like hardware transform and lighting. I know dxdiag reports no AGP texture acceleration available, so it likely runs the video through the virtualized PCI bus which will limit speed for those aggressive kinds of games.

I played a couple of things like the Plus! Hyperbowl bowling game (have the purchased version too, and will try it), and Arkanoid Virtual Isles. They're Direct 3D games and they work. But neither filled the whole 1024x768 resolution I'm using, setting themselves to 640x480 and having those black picture frame things around the reduced screen.

So, it's a wonderful addition (the Direct 3D) to VMWare no matter that everything hasn't been able to be fully implemented. I only mentioned the Linux ATI drivers because I wanted to point out to any ATI users that even though the free driver supports most 3D things on cards through the x850, the openGL upgrade to 2.0 and above (2.1 in this case) that the proprietary fglrx has was needed to get VMWare Direct 3D to activate. The free ones just gave a VMWare ballon popup saying that my current drivers don't support the VMWare 3D so it won't be used. Now, with fglrx, we're good to go.

Except for games like Larry MCL, unfortunately, I suppose. I hope they don't stop working on it though. Perhaps we'll get more magic in the future!

I just like to occasionally play some of the scenes in this game. They're funny, and the mini games are fun. I played through the whole thing, getting all the points, a couple of times when it was fresh. Nothing like the real old Leisure Suit Larry of course, but still fun.

[ksc · Accepted solution]

I know we're using the virtualized card in the guest. I just wondered how much it can virtualize stuff like hardware transform and lighting. I know dxdiag reports no AGP texture acceleration available, so it likely runs the video through the virtualized PCI bus which will limit speed for those aggressive kinds of games.

Virtualized PCI bus is infinitely fast! Short answer is that the virtual SVGA card exposes a high-level shader abstraction, which gets rewritten into shaders on the host. T&L is done with shader in the guest driver. Long answer (and look up 'micah' on this forum):

http://www.usenix.org/events/wiov08/tech/full_papers/dowty/dowty_html/

I only mentioned the Linux ATI drivers because I wanted to point out to any ATI users that even though the free driver supports most 3D things on cards through the x850, the openGL upgrade to 2.0 and above (2.1 in this case) that the proprietary fglrx has was needed to get VMWare Direct 3D to activate. The free ones just gave a VMWare ballon popup saying that my current drivers don't support the VMWare 3D so it won't be used. Now, with fglrx, we're good to go.

The open source drivers don't implement enough of the 3D acceleration (yet). See http://xorg.freedesktop.org/wiki/RadeonFeature - the 3D features range from "not implemented" to "mostly" to "done". As I recall, we need 1.4 (or 2.0) support; that chart says the open source driver is only at 1.3. The fglrx driver has a more complete OpenGL implementation, which is why it works. You can look at the vmware.log file when starting a VM with each driver to compare the feature sets it uses.

[Eck]

The page about the Radeon open source driver's features was what had led be to install those fglrx drivers. Most 3D was working with the radeon set, but mupen64's N64 emulator was not performing as well as it had when I was using my NVidia card, and then came my finding that VMware gave me that message about 3D being disabled. So I went ahead with fglrx and got mupen64 to behave and VMWare to run with 3D.

It's possible that things will get even better as the VMWare developers continue work on the 3D implementation, so hopefully at some point I can try that game and it'll work. I am wondering about the situation where the games I try that DO work are all switching to the 640x480 full screen resolution instead of just using what I have set in Windows Display Properties. All of then play at the set resolution when run on a real Windows computer, or at least don't put the game into a smaller box within my host's 1024x768.

Perhaos I'd need to switch my host and guest to 640x480? Then the guest desktop would look funky but I could see the games in full screen..

I guess that's a separate issue, but if anyone knows why feel free to jump in and explain. It's not vital enough for me to open another thread about it, but if there's a known reason I wouldn't mind the info right here.

I'll change the thread to my question has been answered so that'll go away, but really, it's a "hmm, don't really know about that game specifically" kind of answer. Maybe only the game develper would really have an answer for why.

Thanks for all the suggestions and links!

[aaditya_chandra]

That's mostly right, fixed function T&L is not done with a shader in the guest (atleast not yet!), it is done by the host display driver.

Opensource drivers don't have good offscreen rendering support and lack the proper OpenGL extensions needed for Direct3D 9 emulation. Eg: S3TC for compressed textures (S3 IP) and floating point texture support (SGI IP). Once that gets resolved, 3D should work unhindered in Workstation/Linux.