Would I need a VM or Wine to run a Windows-only MMO game?

ID:751741
 
Aug 29 2010, 12:36 pm
Title. I've had it up to freaking here with Windows' idiocy.
Aug 31 2010, 11:53 am
Yes.

But, if you use a VM, you will still be running Windows inside of the VM (meaning you will have to have a copy of windows to install on there).

Wine, however, is free from windows and free as in beer. It's goal is to be a native linux implementation of Windows API. Not all programs work perfectly on Wine, but you can read how well apps work with versions of Wine here: http://appdb.winehq.org/

Also, Virtual Machines don't have amazing DirectX support, but they do have Direct3D as of a year or 2 ago. It doesn't seem too terribly difficult to install, just don't expect anything requiring DirectX 10 to run on a VM.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/virtualbox-3-directx.html
Aug 31 2010, 2:23 pm
In response to Stupot
Hmm. So if you still need Windows installed, what is the point of a VM?
Aug 31 2010, 5:12 pm
In response to Moonlight Memento
Moonlight Memento wrote:
Hmm. So if you still need Windows installed, what is the point of a VM?

Because it allows you to run the Windows games within a virtual machine (essentially running windows inside of a little box) and only have to use it for games and other Windows applications, while being able to use Linux for everything else.

(By the way; get on MSN, I haven't heard from you in a while!)
Aug 31 2010, 6:18 pm
In response to Moonlight Memento
VMs have many purposes, lots of which are corporate uses.

For instance, if you were a website designer and wanted to test your website out on many OSes and many browsers, you can do so quickly with VMs.

Also, as FlameSage said, you can keep your VM system clean and bare and use your host OS for everything (or the other way around).

In my company, we have server farms that host VMs that we remote desktop to and do all of our development there. That keeps the price of extra workspaces down, better utilizes the hardware, and makes it easy for someone to set up a new development environment by copying someone else's existing VM.

I am sure there are many more uses for VMs outside of what I have just described, but now you've at least got an idea.
Sep 1 2010, 7:05 am
In response to Stupot
Just curious, as it's outside the scope of this thread. I've been looking for a free (preferably open source?) way to manage VMs for the use of connecting via thin clients.
Something like XenServer / XenClient, where it's easy to manage multiple VMs remotely and setup the thin clients to automatically connect to the server. Mostly looking at different protocols since RDP tends to be quite laggy, while the XenClient protocol seems to produce a much cleaner experience.
Sep 2 2010, 12:24 pm (Edited on Sep 2 2010, 12:34 pm)
In response to Flame Sage
I don't have any experience with Xen or any headless hypervisor for that matter. At my work, we have VMware server farms that we remote desktop to inside our network.

I prefer to use VirtualBox at home because I just find it much easier to install a guest OS and keep up to date, but I'm not looking to connect to that guest OS remotely. Supposedly VirtualBox does have a way you can run it as a headless server that's actually pretty easy, but I've never done it.