After Nearly A Month, "Loading... Windows XP"
It started with playing around a little with Wine in SUSE, but I've been unable to get it working. I was just tinkering with it, so when I need to use some Windows program, at least I can try to install it in Linux. I had a lot of trouble using winetools which seems to have issues installing DCOM98.exe - a critical component that I really have to have installed before anything else.

I'm wondering if Wine is working at all really... When I start going through the basic setup, it'll say "creating virtual windows drive in ~/.wine" which ~/.wine doesn't exist. I even tried running it as root, with the same trouble. A directory called "winetools" exists, but it only has the files that WineTools downloaded. ~sigh. It's going to be a while before I get Wine to work. I've heard somethings about WineX, but I haven't looked into that yet - but I believe that it is not free.

So, I can't use Windows apps in Linux, at least not yet. Well, last night, while most of my roommates were at the campus LAN party, I decided that I wanted to play "The Sims 2" - after all, one of my reasons for buying this computer was the fact that I couldn't play most games anymore because the CPU just couldn't keep up with it.

Well, finally I got the urge to play it again. So, I decided to boot into Windows to play it....
modified from my livejournal post regarding the subject...
First, I had to boot into Windows XP - I wanted to install "The Sims 2" and play that… That was one of the reasons that I got a P4 3.0 Ghz HT processor with a gig of RAM. It would be able to play most of the games that I'm interested in without a problem. So, I boot into XP. I put the first CD (of four) into the drive and install the Sims 2. It took a while to install, since it's such a large game, but I finally finished CD 4. Once it was done, I tried playing it, but it crashed itself. The second time out, it crashed the video card - first showing a black screen with my Windows mouse pointer in the middle, refusing to allow me to ctrl + alt + del and eventually the LCD just powered off. The third time out, as it was loading, the screen powered off again; however, this time all of a sudden my POST screen for my ABIT board displays.

So, I decided that I would try mounting the ISO I keep of the game… Maybe it was just having trouble loading the CD. This is where it gets complex. I couldn't find my copy of Alcohol 120 - I figured that I had it saved to 迷宮 (Meikyuu - my 250 GB ATA150 harddrive)… And I wasn't about to shutdown Miki (my Windows 2000 machine) and hook up that other harddrive just to get a single installation file. Besides, I knew that DaemonTools was available out there for free. So, I downloaded that.

OOOhhh, but wait! My ISO file is on 迷宮!! Damn… What to do… What to do… Oh, Nero! I'll just make another ISO… Or so I thought. Nero wasn't installed. Another thing that I forgot to put on my "to-do ASAP after installing XP" list… So, I got out my Nero CD and installed that. w00t… I can almost see the finish line now, or so I thought.

I had one heck of a time with Nero… It wanted to do anything accept make an ISO. I tried setting the burner to burn from the NEC DVD-RW to the Nero Image Drive… But it just didn't work. It kept saying that the medium was blank and each time the burn failed, it would eject the CDROM and when I reinserted it, it would autoload Sims 2, which would take quite some time, so I would have to either wait a good 2/3 minutes or use task manager to kill Sims2.exe. I did the latter.

Eventually, I got so frustrated with Nero that I just gave up on it. I ended up switching over to Miki and shutting it down; so I could hookup 迷宮. Once 迷宮 was up, I was able to grab the ISO file for Sims 2 and Alcohol 120 - just in case DaemonTools was part of the problem.

Oh, and now for the joys of networking. I just couldn't get Windows XP to allow me to log on to it over the network… I just wanted to grab the files (from Miki) and send them across the network to Suzi-XP. But no… Something was stopping me, probably the Windows Firewall or something in the Local Security Policy. So, I did a quick fix… I switched over to Suzi-XP and connected to Miki to pull the files off it. That worked, easy as pie.

Then, I installed Alcohol 120 --it's similar to DaemonTools, but I've used Al120 more than DT, so I thought this might help clear things up… but, it didn't. Out of frustration, I uninstalled Sims 2 and reinstalled it, this time using Al120 to mount CD1 and then going on with the rest of the installer through the CDROM. It installed just fine, but when I would start the game, it would do the same damn thing over again. Grrr. The worst part about it, was all that rebooting I had to do! That part took forever, especially if I missed choosing "Windows XP" in the Grub (the bootloader)… If I missed it, Grub would start up SUSE Linux… And I'd have to wait for that to load before I could choose to restart into Windows XP.

By the tenth reboot (for one reason or another) I was really frustrated… I wasn't sure what exactly I was going to do at that point… The Windows XP would crash or have some other problem each time I tried to use the game… I was to the point where I thought that the only thing left for me to do was to uninstall the game and give up on it. That's when I started thinking, "What if it's not the game that's crashing?" BINGO!!

I decided to check the nVidia site for possible updates to the nVidia software… I wasn't able to tell if what I had installed was the latest or if what they had on their website was more recent, but going with the logic that if there was an update in the past two or three months, I wouldn't have it yet - so I should just download the driver and try installing it.

After installing it, I had to do another reboot. Go figure. Once I was back up and running, I decided to check a few of the settings out… I noticed that my refresh rate (not that it really matters on an LCD, but it still may have some affect on the video card) was set to 75 hz… I decided to down it a little to 72. I also noticed that my colors were set to 32-bit, so I downed that one level to 16-bit. Leaving the resolution of the screen at 1280x1024.

Then I tried booting the game. And it work on the first try!! I'm not sure if the updated nVidia driver fixed it or if it was something to do with the settings that I adjusted. The game did work in Windows 2000, using a much older version of the nVidia software (and a much older machine), so I'd say that it's likely that it was something with the settings… I just wish that the game had said something about that earlier.
end livejournal modified quote