Dangerous Waters and Virtual Box

[goldorak]

Well for those that might be interested : Dangerous Waters runs very well on XP in Virtualbox with 3d acceleration enabled. The only problem that still is not resolved is the gamma (too dark although you can still see the different stations) and most importantly some screens disappear if you select specific options, but they come back we those options are unselected. These problems are few so I hope the guys working on the 3d component of Virtualbox will have it fixed sooner rather than later.
Oh and by the way the audio works 100%.
All this for what you may ask ? Well if you're considering going all the way to linux and don't want to renounce to your daily drug of DW, Virtualbox is your only friendly alternative seeing that Wine still has audio not working so the game on Wine is perfectly useless. One less stone on the path to linux.

[Pisces]

There is a gamma setting in the ini file. Did you change that?

[goldorak]

Originally Posted by Pisces

There is a gamma setting in the ini file. Did you change that?

Yes, I tried setting a specific value in the .ini file but the "graphic drivers" don't take it into account. We have to wait until the driver is updated to take into account the gamma setting.

[kgsuarez]

Thank you for your post, goldorak. I am glad to hear that DW is kind of working under Linux now.

I haven't been able to get VirtualBox running yet. I am stuck in dependency hell right now. Slackware Linux gives you a pretty bare-bones system, requiring you to hunt down all the dependencies when installing something as complex as VirtualBox.

I am expecting a new computer any day now though. I ordered a laptop from Dell. I am planning to install Ubuntu on it, and then perhaps I'll have an easier time getting VirtualBox running on that.

Have you tried running DW through VMWare by any chance?

[goldorak]

No I don't have VMware its too much of a bloated software compared to Virtualbox. The thing is you can either run DW under wine or in Virtualbox.
In the first case you'll get no sound because that part of the Microsoft API hasn't been completely replicated in wine. So the game is basically useless even though graphically its ok.
Now to run the game in virtualbox you have got to install beforehand XP. So its basically DW runs on XP that runs in Virtualbox that runs on linux.
In this case the audio is ok but the graphics still has problems (for instance in the options menu you can see the little 3d screen but the different options are invisibile). Little problems like that.
So in the end no solution yet for running DW 100% problem free under linux but we are getting there.

[kgsuarez]

I have tried running DW with wine and I am familiar with the sound issues. I certainly hope that the dev team can come up with a solution one of these days, as a simple layer of emulation provided by wine is preferable to running an entire virtual machine. My hardware is perpetually outdated and underpowered; Virtualization essentially murders my systems' performance.

I'm mostly interested in running a virtual machine to play around with different Linux and BSD distributions. However, I am definitely curious about getting my games running on my Linux laptop. The only problem in all of this for me is that I do not have a copy of Windows XP to use with VirtualBox or VMWare. The only copy of it that I have is the one on my desktop. And I do not have an installation disk; I have a set of recovery disks that only work with the specific hardware of my desktop.

In the meantime I am able to run Red Storm Rising through an Amiga emulator and Aces of the Deep through DOSBox. So, I am not at a total loss by any means.

[Rotary Crewman]

Been out of the loop for a while, but I was wondering, if the game is working on Linux does that mean it could work on OSX?

[goldorak]

Originally Posted by Rotary Crewman

Been out of the loop for a while, but I was wondering, if the game is working on Linux does that mean it could work on OSX?

The game doesn't work.
Under wine you don't have the sound effects which are pretty necessary to have to be able to play the game.
On the other hand installing DW in XP under Virtualbox will get the sounds but there are graphics problems with the interface, you can't change settings and so forth.

Your best bet would be to use virtualbox in osx.
Install xp in virtualbox and then DW. That should get you started, but the options menu won't work.

[AchtAchtel]

I was running DW without any problems under wine for a long time, however - the only problem was networking.

Next thing is I was running it under v. old laptop (P3 1GHz) so I had to 'cut' all effects as possible. Laptop was Toshiba Portege 1505 and the linux distro was Debian. I can't remember any changes done to wine nor DW configuration to get sound work. Ping worked not so well (sometimes pings were lost or 'doubled' - kinda 'echoed') but in general - it was fully playable.

Can't remember what wine version was this, but surely some old, compiled on my own. Maybe I was lucky? :]

And again - please tell whether networking works on DW emulated on XP @ Virtualbox. Are you able to HOST or JOIN session?

[goldorak]

Originally Posted by AchtAchtel

And again - please tell whether networking works on DW emulated on XP @ Virtualbox. Are you able to HOST or JOIN session?

I don't know because I didn't have the occasion to test multiplayer.
I only installed virtualbox to know if DW would run better than in wine, and the answer is yes it runs better. But multiplayer, I have no idea.

[kgsuarez]

I tried to get DW working under Linux with VirtualBox today and it did not go well. I am getting an error when launching DW. Something like "Failed to initialize graphics." Any of you have any idea what this is about?