Issues with direct draw

[dbowlin17]

I am trying to play Sim City 4 on VBOX with Ubuntu 9.10 as the host and Windows XP Home SP3 as the guest. I get an error saying that direct draw failed to initialize. I have tried installing guest additions.

[Perryg]

Did you install the guest additions in safe mode?

[dbowlin17]

Yes. I have tried that. I still have the same error of could not initialize direct draw. I have attatched the screenshot of the error.

[mpack]

I think some hint as to VirtualBox version would be useful as well.

[dbowlin17]

3.0.8_OSE sorry about that.

[Perryg]

Read here. http://compsimgames.about.com/od/simcit ... ements.htm for the game requirements.
VBox does not support DirectX 7 yet only 8 and 9 right now.

[dbowlin17]

so, if it used directx 8 or 9, it won't work with directx 7? also, is there any time table for directx7 support...?

[Perryg]

Correct and I don't have the time table. The DEVs are the only ones that have this.

[TheKougar]

That is unfortunate. I thought I'd finally found a way to play this game again.

[stefan.becker]

Dual Boot is one Solution, WINE is another.

Forget VMs for gaming. Thats like driving Formula 1 with a VW Beetle. That only works on Disney Channel.

[TheKougar]

Unfortunately it seems my HW is so new XP won't even get into the installer for it, much less find supported drivers. So dual boot's not an option

[stefan.becker]

Then try dual boot with linux and WINE on linux. Thats a good solution for older games .

With a VM you will never get good performance for gaming.

[mpack]

Unfortunately it seems my HW is so new XP won't even get into the installer for it, much less find supported drivers. So dual boot's not an option

I rather doubt that. I'm using XP on a modern PC right now, and hardware hasn't really changed that much over the past couple of years. If you were a bit more specific about the actual problem then I could maybe say more, but it's probably nothing that a temporary BIOS tweak and new driver can't cure.

[ipsi]

I found that I could actually get SimCity 4 Deluxe to launch on a Windows XP VM (Host: Ubuntu 10.10, Virtual Box: 4.0.4, installed from PPA). It gives me that error message, yes, but when I close it the game launches normally for me. There are a few possible reasons for this:

1. Options used to launch the game are: -CustomResolution:enabled -r1920x1080x32 -intro:off -d:software
2. I've allocated 3GiB of RAM to the XP machine, out of 16GiB total.
3. My processor is pretty fast - Intel Core i7-2600, so running at roughly 3.5GHz. However, I've only allocated one 'processor' to the XP VM, as apparently SimCity 4 doesn't like more than that for some reason.
4. I've installed the latest patch for the game (Am I allowed to mention that I've installed the NoCD patch as well on this board?)

Of all of those, the first is probably the most important, as it means that I am setting up a custom resolution (1920x1080), and (more importantly) telling the game I want to use the Software render, and not the Hardware (Direct3D or OpenGL) renderer. So it probably attempts to check for the DirectX stuff on startup, but because I've told it to use the Software Renderer, the fact that it can't find it means it actually runs once you close the error message box.

I haven't played much yet, but it runs faster on the XP Virtual Machine than it does on my non-virtual Windows 7! As a quick test, I loaded up the Big City tutorial, and though it wasn't perfectly smooth, it looked it would have been playable. Your mileage will obviously vary with your hardware. And of course graphics options can be adjusted up/down to improve performance.

I was also able to get it running without too much trouble on WINE, but has some odd graphical glitches, which are annoying, so I'll probably play around with the XP VM copy for a while and see how that works out.

Anyways, I hope that helps you get your SimCity fix