May 3, 2008 at 06:02Old games near Ubunta
Computer games are not only the killing of time and burning of life, but also a lot of pleasure, relaxation and just interesting time spent. :)
Somehow it so happened that I personally most of all want to play it in my old favorite games. Such as Fallout, StarCraft, Diablo (first), etc. Moreover, if for very old games there is DosBox , then with games for Windows it is a bit more complicated.
Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is Wine . It’s not that it didn’t suit me at all, but somehow it’s very strange that it sometimes glitches and generally behaves extremely unstable.
I decided to try installing through a virtual machine. As a virtual machine, I took VirtualBox .
By the way, there is another problem that I encountered quite recently - widescreen monitors. Of course, you can get used to it, but still, the stretch is visible to the naked eye. In addition, the screen size is also strongly influenced - on a laptop 17 ", and on a stationary, in general - 22". If you stretch from 640x480 or even from 800x400 to the full screen - the image completely loses its sharpness and proportion. A trifle, of course, but pleasure is not that. :)
In Wine, to solve this problem, you can use virtual desktop emulation with hard-set dimensions, but at the same time you get a window mode, and I personally am very distracted by the "external frame" from running applications and the desktop - and the atmosphere of the game is lost. ..
This problem was resolved by itself, since VirtualBox launches full-screen applications in the guest OS, not stretched, but in the original size at the resolution of the "host" axis, with black fields in the rest of the screen; but a new one appeared - everything would be fine, but the native resolution of 1440x900 is on the 17 "laptop monitor - so the“ picture ”with the game is too small. The permission to change doesn’t come out at all, but if it does, then to pull the resolution every time, when I want to play somehow not comme il faut. :)
I solved this problem with the compiz window manager . It has a wonderful effect - Enhanced Zoom Desktop, which was enabled by default after installing Ubunta.
To make everything work as it should - first you need to install the configuration configurator for detailed configuration. In the menu "Programs-> Add / Remove ..." at the request of "compiz" in the search with the filter "All available applications" the first program is Advansed Desktop Effects Settings. After installation, it can be found in the menu "System-> Parameters". After launching the customizer, click the “Enhanced Zoom Desktop” button in the effects list and in the third tab (Mouse Behavior) uncheck the “Sync Mouse” box so that the enlarged screen does not “drive” the mouse.
And then everything is simple - we start the virtual machine in the window, enlarge the screen using the combination “Super + Mouse Wheel Up” (Win + MouseWheel) to the required size. We switch to the virtual machine window and expand it to the full screen with the “Host + F” combination, and turn on the mouse capture with the “Host + I” combination, where Host is the key that gives control from the guest OS to the virtual machine. By default, this is the right Ctrl; but I, for example, do not have such a key on the laptop, because I have this right Alt (Alt Gr). The second (about “Host + I”) is only necessary if “guest add-ons” are installed that make the mouse “transparent” for the guest OS — no control is given to guest programs and the mouse does not work properly in games.
Thus, we get a normally scaled image of the game, enlarged to the size we need, with black fillings of the “empty” space at the edges. :)
Somehow it so happened that I personally most of all want to play it in my old favorite games. Such as Fallout, StarCraft, Diablo (first), etc. Moreover, if for very old games there is DosBox , then with games for Windows it is a bit more complicated.
Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is Wine . It’s not that it didn’t suit me at all, but somehow it’s very strange that it sometimes glitches and generally behaves extremely unstable.
I decided to try installing through a virtual machine. As a virtual machine, I took VirtualBox .
By the way, there is another problem that I encountered quite recently - widescreen monitors. Of course, you can get used to it, but still, the stretch is visible to the naked eye. In addition, the screen size is also strongly influenced - on a laptop 17 ", and on a stationary, in general - 22". If you stretch from 640x480 or even from 800x400 to the full screen - the image completely loses its sharpness and proportion. A trifle, of course, but pleasure is not that. :)
In Wine, to solve this problem, you can use virtual desktop emulation with hard-set dimensions, but at the same time you get a window mode, and I personally am very distracted by the "external frame" from running applications and the desktop - and the atmosphere of the game is lost. ..
This problem was resolved by itself, since VirtualBox launches full-screen applications in the guest OS, not stretched, but in the original size at the resolution of the "host" axis, with black fields in the rest of the screen; but a new one appeared - everything would be fine, but the native resolution of 1440x900 is on the 17 "laptop monitor - so the“ picture ”with the game is too small. The permission to change doesn’t come out at all, but if it does, then to pull the resolution every time, when I want to play somehow not comme il faut. :)
I solved this problem with the compiz window manager . It has a wonderful effect - Enhanced Zoom Desktop, which was enabled by default after installing Ubunta.
To make everything work as it should - first you need to install the configuration configurator for detailed configuration. In the menu "Programs-> Add / Remove ..." at the request of "compiz" in the search with the filter "All available applications" the first program is Advansed Desktop Effects Settings. After installation, it can be found in the menu "System-> Parameters". After launching the customizer, click the “Enhanced Zoom Desktop” button in the effects list and in the third tab (Mouse Behavior) uncheck the “Sync Mouse” box so that the enlarged screen does not “drive” the mouse.
And then everything is simple - we start the virtual machine in the window, enlarge the screen using the combination “Super + Mouse Wheel Up” (Win + MouseWheel) to the required size. We switch to the virtual machine window and expand it to the full screen with the “Host + F” combination, and turn on the mouse capture with the “Host + I” combination, where Host is the key that gives control from the guest OS to the virtual machine. By default, this is the right Ctrl; but I, for example, do not have such a key on the laptop, because I have this right Alt (Alt Gr). The second (about “Host + I”) is only necessary if “guest add-ons” are installed that make the mouse “transparent” for the guest OS — no control is given to guest programs and the mouse does not work properly in games.
Thus, we get a normally scaled image of the game, enlarged to the size we need, with black fillings of the “empty” space at the edges. :)