Playing in a virtual machine

AnonymousHero

Hi all,

Just wondering (before shelling out cash)... is anyone out there playing BG:EE/BG2:EE in any type of virtual machine environment? Does it perform adequately? (... and if so, which VM are you using, what's the host OS, etc.?)

DrHappyAngry

Never tried it myself, and not sure I see the point of it, since they run natively on all the major OSes. I'd think you'd need GPU passthrough working in the hypervisor, and a gpu to give up to it. An nvidia one would probably be the easiest to make it work for linux. You'll also need a CPU that supports either Intel VT-D or AMD-VI, as well as a hypervisor that supports GPU passthrough. I know passthrough is possible on xen and kvm/qemu, although that varies with kernel versions.

I've been running the games natively on linux for awhile, just fine (well still one minor bug not fixed with BG:EE), so I'm curious what the reason for doing this in a VM is. Steam does now allow for refunds, so you could always buy them there and try them in a VM.

AnonymousHero

OK, I'm just really paranoid and prefer to run any proprietary code in a VM, so I've been using VirtualBox 4.x (running "vanilla" BG -- not perfectly, but acceptably), but I'm not sure it's powerful enough for the EE series. (Which I've considered buying off GoG.)

I certainly don't have GPU passthrough, so that's probably going to be the major sticking point.

However, VirtualBox 5.x was recently released and apparently graphics performance has increased drastically, so perhaps I'll just try GoG -- I think they have a 30-day money back guarantee (though I'd have to look into what the details of that are).

EDIT: Oh, yes, reason for using a VM as opposed to "native Linux"... sometimes mods can only be applied on Win32 systems -- unfortunate, but true.

DrHappyAngry

I haven't tried mods, but I'm pretty sure most of them run on Linux. Ya, I've seen some that are windows only. I do have eekeeper working through wine, with my native linux installs of bg:ee and bg2:ee. What mods are you specifically trying to run? If nobody can confirm if one works, I might be able to take a crack at it and see if it works. So long as you're running the game in your user account, and not as root, you should be safe running games natively.

And it seems a bit odd to be so paranoid as to run software in a vm, but use a hypervisor created by oracle to do it

AnonymousHero

I'm running VirtualBox OSE... not that I've actually inspected the source code, but I could theoretically do that. (As a conscientious software developer I would think that they'd work a little harder to produce non-broken and somewhat readable/understandable code considering that everyone could go read it. I know that's what I do.)

My original experience with a non-working mod was with BGT. It used some features of .BAT scripting that didn't work with WINE. (Obviously, that's not relevant with the EE series, but still...)

Anyway, I think I'll give the GoG "version" a try with VBox 5.x when my distro gets VBox 5.

DrHappyAngry

At least you're running the OSE version. I do think what you're doing is overkill, but I do get it. One thing you might want to think about is, when you pick the linux version over the windows version to download, that's a Linux sale. Companies do track platform sales, and I want to make sure we keep getting native games on Linux. So I'd encourage you to try it in Linux first, even if it's in a VM. GOG and Steam give you access to the game on all platforms, so at least you won't be out any money if you do need windows to run a mod.