trying to play ddo, help

[Dudester]

I have a Mac (OS X Lion) running Windows 7 in a VirtualBox. I"m trying to play this game called Dungeons & Dragons Online. The game Launcher works, but I get this error when it tries to run the game.
"No suitable graphics device was found. Are you running through a remote session or a VM? If not, please check your video hardware capabilities(error 122)".
I understand what this means, but this game runs on my 10 year old Dell, my computer should be able to handle this game(which has easy system requirements). The game's support site says this about error 122.

"If you know your card meets those requirements but the 122 error still comes up, what this usually means is that the game cannot detect certain support for its required features via DirectX and your cards drivers. Contact your graphics card or PC manufacturer to make sure that you have the most updated drivers available for your card installed, and update them where necessary. Older drivers sometimes have limited support for the games features; updating them to the newest available can allow the game to detect support for its settings and launch past the 122 error.

You can also receive this message if Windows is in "safe mode", or if you are launching the game on system that has a "Generic" video driver installed that cannot support 3D rendering. If booting into "safe mode", you will need to launch Windows under a normal bootup and verify that the correct drivers for your card are loading.

To find out what driver is being loaded and other key info, launch the "DirectX Diagnostic Tool" (dxdiag):

Click the Windows "Start" button and click "Run" or click into "Start Search"
Type "dxdiag" (no quotes) and press "Enter"
You can skip the "WHQL signatures" check at launch if you wish by choosing "No"
When the "DirectX Diagnostic Tool" screen opens, click on the tab labeled "Display". There the column on the right will detail the graphics driver information such as driver date, card model, driver version etc.

Use this information to determine:

Are the correct drivers installed?
Is a generic or other type driver loading instead?
Are they significantly out of date? (older than 1.5 years is a typical starting point for determining if drivers are out of date).
Most often, updating/reinstalling the drivers will remedy this issue, unless your systems graphics card is not supported.

In some instances, you might need to have the game redetect and reset its graphics configurations, which can be done by following these steps:

Click on the Windows "Start" button
Click on "Documents" or "My Documents"
Depending on the game, open either the "The Lord of the Rings Online" or "Dungeons and Dragons Online" folder
Find "Userpreferences.ini" (it might just display as "Userpreferences") and right-click and "rename" it (eg. "olduserpreferences.ini" and hit "Enter"
Launch the game and log in, but stop at "Server Select" (if you have "Load last played world" enabled disable this)
At the "server select" list, click the first button in the row in the upper-right corner of the launcher (the one with the single down-arrow on it) and choose "Options" from the menu
In "Options" under the "Repair" tab, click to activate the "Reset game display settings" option, click "Ok" and continue logging into the game choosing "Yes" when asked if you want to reset the settings
What this does is "forces" the game to reconfigure and redetect the systems graphics (and sound) hardware and configure its "default" settings based on DirectX and your loaded drivers."

I tried doing the last step of chaining the user preferences, but that didn't work. Is there a way I could work around this?

[Sasquatch]

It seems you haven't read the User Manual before posting here. There, it's described that you must install the Guest Additions in Windows Safe Mode and enable 3D before you get some form of 3D available for games.

[Dudester]

Thanks! Now I need .net framework v1.1 run. When I try to instal .net framework v1.1 it says "this software has known incompatibility with IIS(Internet Information Services) services on this platform.

In investigating IIS, I found I had to go to Control Panel(view by category)>Programs>"Turn Windows Features on or off" & enable some things. Anyways I clicked run the program anyway, in doing so I got DDO launcher to load and now I'm going to try running the game again...

[Dudester]

the game worked. Although its performance sucks. My computer isn't powerful enough to run even a simple game... It was very 'stuttery' when my character turned my computer would lag. This is with the all video settings on low. Perhaps with a new mac, with a core I processor, the performance would be better.

This is DDO's system requirements
O.S.: Windows® XP
Processor: P4 1.6 GHz or AMD equivalent with SSE
Memory: 512 MB RAM
GraphicsCard: 64 MB Hardware T&L -compatible video card
NetworkConnection: 56.6 K modem
DirectX: DirectX 9.0c
DiscSpace: 3GB, 5GB for high resolution

My Mac's are
Intel Core 2 Duo(2.26Ghz)
4GB Ram
Nvidia GeForce 9400m (256RAM)

[rpmurray]

My computer isn't powerful enough to run even a simple game...

No. Your computer isn't powerful enough to run OS X Lion, Windows 7, and the simple game all at the same time. Have you considered creating a Windows XP VM? Or using Boot Camp to install Windows 7 and running the game from there? Or upping the amount of RAM (either in the host, the VM, or both)? The GPU in the Mac is immaterial because the guest is seeing an emulated GPU with some pretty low specs. By the way, how much RAM did you give the guest for video?

[Dudester]

Thanks for replying. I got DDO running!
But its incredibly laggy. Just turning gives me lag. The sound is buggy two. I tried lowering graphic settings but nothing seems to help. Any thoughts of how to fix this b4 trying another way of running DDO on my Mac??

To answer your question I gave Windows 7 host 1354mb of RAM.
Should I post all my VirtualBox configurations???
Oh, I also plugged in a flash drive to see if Windows 7 could use it for Readyboost. When I went to the flash drive's settings tho it said the system is too fast to take advantage of the flash drive(or something along those lines).

[Dudester]

My computer isn't powerful enough to run even a simple game...

No. Your computer isn't powerful enough to run OS X Lion, Windows 7, and the simple game all at the same time. Have you considered creating a Windows XP VM? Or using Boot Camp to install Windows 7 and running the game from there? Or upping the amount of RAM (either in the host, the VM, or both)? The GPU in the Mac is immaterial because the guest is seeing an emulated GPU with some pretty low specs. By the way, how much RAM did you give the guest for video?

Would running DDO in a Windows XP VM be dangerous? I wanted to use Windows 7 b/c I thought it would be more secure(I also like Windows 7 a lot more than XP, but thats not a huge issue). Do I have to worry about viruses and such? Or does it not matter since its all blocked(or more than Windows at least) by the host machine?

[stefan.becker]

Forget your approach, games in a VM are nonsense.

Why not using BootCamp? Then you can install Windows with DualBoot and start the game native.

[Sasquatch]

Would running DDO in a Windows XP VM be dangerous? I wanted to use Windows 7 b/c I thought it would be more secure(I also like Windows 7 a lot more than XP, but thats not a huge issue). Do I have to worry about viruses and such? Or does it not matter since its all blocked(or more than Windows at least) by the host machine?

Windows in itself is dangerous . There is no specific saying that XP is less secure than Windows 7, but Windows 7 does have a few more security measures than XP does by default.

Since you got the game going in a VM, you know what performance you can expect. Since it was very laggy, you can assume that the game demands quite a bit of processing power, especially on the graphical side. VB is not made to provide that. Best thing to get it going in a decent way, is following Stefan's advise.