::To all those gaming cats and kittens out there::

This project came about due to the fact that I've never been very good with any attempt at making WINE a stable environment for running PC games. The thought had crossed my mind a few times to instead run everything inside of a virtual windows environment instead of just having a "virtual registry". So here's what I have:

My current box specs are in my sig, running Ubuntu 10.10.

Using VMware Player, I loaded a "free" academic version of Windows XP Pro SP3. I dedicated 2GB of RAM and 40 GB of virtual HDD space. By default VM loaded 128MB of VRAM. This turned out to be just enough to see if the DirectX would run. However, not as smoothly as I expected. Half-Life 2 runs with quite a bit of lag but enough stability to be some-what enjoyable.

So I think my question is:

• Where do I go from here. I obviously need more VRAM for the guest but I don't know exactly how to have the guest OS see my hardware, if at all possible.

The problem is not only the amount of VRAM, but the emulation of the video-card itself. It is just not powerful enough to run newer games smooth. You will have no problems with older games (Halflife 2 is now seven years old), but you will not get newer games running.

By the way, I have tried almost all my games with Wine (and I have a lot), and only two of them currently were not running with Wine. I always follow this rules to get the games running:
1. Every game gets its own environment using the WINEPREFIX-variable.
2. If it doesn't work with a normal Wine-environment I try to reduce it to 32 bit with WINEARCH=win32.
3. Always read all the documentation for a game in the application database before installing a game.