I've got a few really old games I still like to play, Warcraft 3 and Diablo II (and the LoD addon).

I'm running 14.1 and quite happy with it so far, I even got my printer and scanner MFC to work.

I figured if I wanted to play these games, I might as well use Virtualbox since I've read a few posts here and there about using it for games and such.

So I installed it from slackbuilds.org, and all dependencies. Go through the setup and all seems okay.

I install Diablo II and it does the video test but comes back with a message about it unable to find a video mode it can use.

So I open control panel (by the way, I installed Windows XP and all the SP's for it and DirectX 9 etc) and try to install the nvidia drivers I downloaded for my gt520 card. It says it can't find the hardware (meaning the card).

I go back into the VB setup and try to find something about video but nothing is there that is helping.

Does anyone have any ideas what I missed or may be doing wrong or is this just a shortcoming of VB?

It's a shortcoming of any VM really. VMs are not really made for gaming. You'd be better off dual-booting and using native hardware resources rather than VM resources.

wc3 works amazing in wine
d2 works good, but you need to set up something (i think it was glide wrapper)

PS virtualbox has its own drivers for windows and uses the ones from linux to do the work

The reason you have issues would be because passing a display adapter to a vm is not supported. I have seen here and there some people seem to have success but that is always with a secondary graphics card, not the primary. You must then also make sure you are able to use vtd or iommu and have lots of time for research amd patience for tweaking configs.

virtualbox does an abstraction of a graphics card
3D (and 2D) acceleration support in virtualbox is not fully done yet
it works, kinda, but not for anything demanding

i hear maybe vmware might work

Well drat. I suppose I could try to dual-boot. Oh well, I don't blame VB, at least XP was working pretty well...for M$, heh.

Thanks for the answers everyone, much appreciated.

All hypervisors do as you say. I was referring to experiments using advanced virtualization technologies and some experimental configurations having limited success with passing a non primary display device directly to a guest. That is not something that the majority of people at home do since most consumer setups lack the ability to assign hardware directly to virtualmachines.

really, warcraft 3 works perfectly in wine
even better then on xp

and d2 works good enough

bdw, if you didn't know
http://www.winehq.org/

I actually have a copy of the latest and greatest Crossover office, but it too was not working very well. I might just give wine a chance since it has been some years since I've tried it out.

If games don't run in Wine you should try using VMWare Player. VMWare has decent 3D guest acceleration for Windows XP.

You'll get the same results regardless of the VM you choose. Hypervisors do not allow direct access to the host system hardware, even if it has 3D acceleration, you'll still going through the hypervisor and it's going to impact performance significantly. Some games actually do require a true Intel, Nvidia, AMD, or other actually branded hardware video card to operate correctly, or it will either refuse to run the game, or put you into software rendering which will hurt performance even more.

If you want games, choose dual-booting. There's absolutely nothing wrong with using Windows if you want the best quality experience for your games. There's plenty of free software available to keep your Windows side safe and fully functional as your GNU/Linux side.

VMs, Wine, and CrossOver are made mostly for productivity work, testing, and some standard applications and work loads, not gaming. While some games are found to work under Wine, it is still not recommended you use Wine for this purpose.

Just tried WINE...it doesn't work either, unfortunately.

I despise M$ with a passion, but it looks like ReaperX7 is right - I'm going to have to install that waste of air pos M$ to play these games. Luckily I just the other day before trying all the VM's and WINE stuff, I'd ordered a new hdd. When it gets here, I'm hoping to use it as my main hdd (it's the latest WD Black, the FZEX, 1TB). Looks like I'll have to do a regular install so I can partition it since doing a clone image from my current 160GB would be no help in having all that extra space wasted. I'll use the third hdd (my spare atm that is cloned with my sda) as the hdd for the M$ since it's slow, noisy, old and won't be a loss if it finally wears out with the M$ on it, heh heh.

quick tip on wine things

check out the winedb page about the thing you plan to run
for example
http://appdb.winehq.org/objectManage...estingId=82233

intro videos might give trouble

put -opengl when running, like
wine start /unix /wherever/war.exe -opengl


there is usually something to do
it used to be more

Hmmm, that's odd. Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne (don't know about Diablo II) works fine for me in wine. I haven't tinkered with it too much to make it work.

Want to describe your problem a bit (since clearly many others according to winehq.org have been able to get Warcraft III to work under wine)?

I'm no fan of Windows either, but it has it's uses as an OS for gaming purposes. Wine is improving but most games that use memory address protection tools and network packet encryption tools for anti-hacking and packet injection disruption use a Ring 0 kernel runtime and/or driver will never run under Wine unfortunately as Wine is userspace only.

As far as reliability goes, Windows 7 is the best choice to go with. A lot of games run fairly well on it and if you need support for older games from the 16-bit DOS/3.x era run well through DOSBox.

Until developers actually take better notice of the UNIX market for gaming, especially with GNU/Linux, though I clearly doubt any time soon that will happen, me, you, and everybody else will still have to rely on Windows for gaming.