trying to get WITP going on VirtualBox

[wfzimmerman]

I run all my games on a Windows guest in a Linux host. I have latest version 4.14 guest addditions Intel Sandybridge CPU.

When I launch WITP the screen stays black, nothing happens.

here is my dxdiag.

is there a graphics setting file that can degrade gracefully, or a log file that explains the failure?

[moore4807]

I'm, certainly no expert, but I noticed your running your emulation on an I7 quad core with only 1GB of RAM??? My I7 quad core processor uses over a half GB RAM just to run a Vista system and Win7 is a much more intensive system. If the machine does not have a seperate video card, (and it appears not to have one) then your system probably doesnt have the minimum requirement to play AE. Have you run a direct draw test on your system using the emulator? It will tell you how much video RAM you have available AFTER you system resources have been accounted for.

[larryfulkerson]

+1. I've got 2Gig of RAM and when I have WITP-AE, FireFox, 2 instances of MSPaint, and notepad++ all running at the same time I'm approaching the limits of my system too. No problemo so far, knock on wood.

[wfzimmerman]

Thanks! All I had to do was to increase the size on my VirtualBox to 2GB. Works like a champ. Now all I have to do is understand the game!

[wfzimmerman]

How do I set the resolution to higher than 1024 x 768? I have a 1920 x 1280 monitor but by default the screen only fills 1024 x 768.

[moore4807]

There was a post on here or WITP that gave instructions on how to change resolutions or make it windowed I just dont remember the answer, sorry! [;)]
You may want to search this forum for the keyword resolution...Best of luck!

PS to understand the game, please read the After Action Reports... There are some seriously talented players there and I've learned a lot!
PS Larry Fulkerson (above) has a new Japanese Campaign game AAR just started. Several knowledgeable people have posted offering quality advice and suggestions to Larry (and all others willing to soak up knowledge!). Larry himself has been awesomely helpful to me with this game, cant say enough about the man! Check it out!

[larryfulkerson]

Here's what I did to do what you're asking. There are some shortcut switches you can add to the "target" of your shortcut.

After the closing quote of the existing quote use the switches "-w" and "-px" and "-py" to set the resolution.

EDIT: here's my target line:

"C:\Matrix Games\War in the Pacific Admiral's Edition\War in the Pacific Admiral Edition.exe" -w -px1440 -py900 -dd_sw -cpu2 -altFont

-w set the windowed mode to 'on'
-px1440 is the resolution of the X axis
-py 900 is the resolution of the Y axis
-dd_sw tells the program to use software rather than the graphics card operations. Usually makes graphic glitches go away.
-cpu2 tells the program that I have 2 CPU's
-altFont tells the program that I'm older and need a different font than the stock font so I can read it better.

[Dan Nichols]

Larry,

-cpu2 tells the program to use CPU 2, not that you have 2 CPUs.

[larryfulkerson]

ORIGINAL: Dan Nichols
Larry,

-cpu2 tells the program to use CPU 2, not that you have 2 CPUs.

Right, right. You're right, sorry. Um......but um...why would you not want to use all the CPU's you have? There are some machines coming out now that have 4 and if I had 4 I'm pretty sure I'd want to use all of them. I can't imagine a scenario where you'd use less than you have. Oh......maybe you have some other process running in the background that needs a couple of them too. But other than that I'm not sure why you'd use less than you have. If you leave off the -cpu switch entirely it defaults to 1 CPU I guess and if you.....um.....no, I still can't think of a situation where you'd use less than.....maybe you have a spreadsheet calculating something in the background and it's huge and .......hmmmmmm.

[USSAmerica]

I'm pretty sure that if you leave the -cpu switch off entirely, it defaults to however Windows wants to handle it. Windows will usually try to take advantage of multiple cpu's and for some technical reason (mostly because the game engine is now about 10 years old), WitP and AE do not do well when it's routines are being passed around by multiple cpu's. It leads to pretty frequent interface "hangs" and pauses in response time for the game. The switch allows you to designate a single cpu for AE to use.

[wdolson]

When the game engine was originally developed (Uncommon Valor era), the only PCs with multiple processors were servers. Desktop computers never had them, so the engine didn't take them into consideration. There is a quirk in the architecture of the engine (also shared by some other games out there that have engines that pre-date multiple processors) that cause dual processors to hiccup under certain conditions.

To really be able to take advantage of multiple processors well a program has to be designed pretty much from the ground up to use them. This is especially true of programs that rely on things taking a certain amount of time, like many game features.

There are basically two areas where these hiccups can occur. One is in the logic built into the processor for handling hand offs back and forth between the processors. AMD and Intel designed their chips differently here. AMD is much better at handling legacy programs than Intel. Some Intel processors are a little different design and are OK. Additionally an Intel won't hiccup on every legacy program, but AE is one of them that does.

The other area where hiccups can occur is within display drivers. Higher end display drivers are optimized to use multiple processor cores and these drivers can cause some programs to manifest the problems. This problem is processor independent, it equally affects multicore processors from both AMD and Intel.

This manifests as a slow down of the game. If you put in one of the cpu# command line switches, you will probably see a speed improvement. I saw it happen on one of my computers when I upgraded the video card and installed a dual processor (just after release of the game). I saw turn processing speeds drop in half and navigating the map got to be glacially slow sometimes.

For the first patch we added several switches so players could experiment and find the best combination that works for their computer.

The only alternative was rewriting the game engine from the ground up to use multiple processors right, which was a bit overkill.

Bill