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Posted by Dave on

Superproject resurrection

Superproject resurrection

I have a set of CA-Superproject’s installation disks and it has been an ambition of mine to see if I can run it on a modern Laptop. My edition failed to run on Windows XP and when I read about W98 and Virtual Box, I decided to see if I could install SPJ on modern desktop platform. I liked SPJ for a couple of reasons, it’s much better than MS Project, it deals with time and money and it has a PERT view which I used to prefer for project planning because it aligns with product based planning in a way that Gnatt charts don’t. Here are my notes …

Posted by Dave on

Virtual Box

Virtual Box

This page has been live for a long time. Sun Microsystems bought Innotek the authors of Virtual Box, an opensource virtualisation product in 2008. It permits Windows/Linux/Solaris guests on the same operating system. I probably started this page slightly later, my first oracle blog on it was dated May 2008. It mainly describes any guest installation tricks.

I have not been systematic in how I document my virtual box projects, some are on this page, some have their own articles, they should all be tagged; https://davelevy.info/wiki/tag/virtual-box.

The shared folder manager script has been uploaded to git, see https://github.com/dfl1955/vboxtools, just in time to be replaced by launchd although there is a problem with systemd and vboxshares, or there was last time I checked.

Posted by Dave on

OpenSUSE and Virtual Box

I have been experimenting with an OpenSUSE Linux VM running in Virtual Box.

This is new to me, and I actually had some problems in making an 11.4 image, and compiling the shared folders helper for 11.3.

I have found these links as part of my work.

I need to document the Guest Additions problem and the 11.4 install problem, which I document on the forums in this thread.

opensolaris, virtualbox, GNOME & RAM 20 Nov 2009

Having been inspired at the Open Solaris usergroup in London on Wednesday, I installed an Open Solaris Virtual Box VM on my works laptop. I came across the guest additions bug in VB 3.0.10 and so upgraded to VB3.0.12 and chose the defaults for the VM. This includes setting the RAM at 768 Mb. (I think it checks how much RAM the host has and makes a recommendation based on that, I am running Windows Business 32 bit and can ‘see’ 3.45 Gb of RAM. ) Anyhow, it seems if the VM has under 1024 Mb of RAM the window manager won’t start. Simple enough to solve. See this thread at http://forums.virtualbox.org

Posted by Dave on

WINE

WINE

The windows software emulator, not more booze. Wine is not an Emulator, it seems. This was originally written in about 2011 when I tried to install NWN on my Mac (For more, see here….). As part of the rollforward from OSX 10.6, in 2013, I needed to rebuild the WINE implementation. I reorganised the wiki pages. There are several methods to install WINE, from source, using a package manager or using Wineskin, which I discuss on this wiki here. In March 2015, I added my notes on using Macports with WINE.

Posted by Dave on

WINE and NWN

WINE and NWN

This page is about my attempts to install NWN under WINE on my MAC. I finally got this working in March 2011 and then attempted to ensure that this page focuses on the NWN actions and runes, and that my WINE page deals with installing WINE on the MAC. I returned in 2014, to try and get NWN2 working. The page consists of several sections, my initial work in 2009, and the further work when I tried to install NWN2 after my Mavericks upgrade.

The sucessful install with Winery is documented in the section called Winery 2014.

Posted by Dave on

Wineskin

Wineskin

I used wineskin and winery to install WINE containers for the apps I want to run on the MAC. This article describes how I did it and cross references to some hyperlinks and other articles on this wiki. I

Posted by Dave on

Running LBA 2 under Dosbox

In order to run LBA 2, the PIF requires the following command

C:\DOSe\dosbox\DOSBox-0.72\dosbox.exe 
    -c "mount d: d:\ -t cdrom -lable lba2 -ioctl -usedcd 1 -fullscreen"
    -c "mount c c:\DOSe\lba2" 
    -c "C:" 
    -c "lba2" 
    -c "exit"

I have tried to get this to run in a .bat, but this works. Obviously the directory path will vary and the name of the CD path. See also dosbox for links to other LBA resources on the ‘net.

And for LBAHQ’s version of the original adventure

C:\DOSe\dosbox\DOSBox-0.72\dosbox.exe 
    -c "mount d: d:\ -t cdrom"
    -c "mount c c:\lba" 
    -c "C:" 
    -c "lba" 
    -c "exit"
Posted by Dave on

Installing WINE from source

Installing WINE from source

At the backend of 2009, I started experiments with WINE on MacOS. I documented my findings at my WINE page on this site. In March 2010, I returned to the project having been advised to use the Macports installation of WINE, instead of building from source. This page documents how I built from source code, and how I installed winetricks. I have moved some of the comments here, from my WINE page, which I now use to capture my experiments with MacPorts & Porticus.

Posted by Dave on

Shell Scripting on Windows

I want to write bash scripts to be emulated using cygwin. This has a problem in that XP uses spaces in its file folder hierarchies and the environment variable initialisation process isn’t good enough. This is actually a snip on writing shell script using cygwin. The virtual boix commands are just the use case which led to me doing the research.

Posted by Dave on

Microsoft RDP & Virtual Box

This article was written in 2010 and became defunct. I have not deleted it as I still use the product and that use is increasing. I may create an RDP page as I don’t expect to need this and the RDP integration with today’s W10 is much better. The article looks at using an ipodtouch to connect to a Windows 7 PC.

Posted by Dave on

Dosbox

They say “DOSBox is an emulator that recreates a MS-DOS compatible environment (complete with Sound, Input, Graphics and even basic networking).” Their home page is at http://www.dosbox.com/.

lba2 on WXP

I have now used it to run Twinsen’s Little Big Adventure 2 (aka LBA2) on my Alienware Aurora.

Here’s how!

  1. Download the Installer
  2. Install DosBox
  3. Read the documentation at their Wiki and at MagicBall. In particular you need to grok the mount command and use it to make the CD drive visible and also to chroot the install directory.
  4. Use dos box to install the game from the CD. See MagicBall’s guide.

There are several ways to then run the game. I have created a shortcut which invokes dosbox and provides the commands to the program using the -c flag. I havn’t yet got to grips with writing a batch file and using that as the -c argument.

And now we have the original adventure

Firstly, visit LBA HQ and its download panel, which offers you a .rar archive. This contains a .iso file. This thread at http://lbahq.com describes how to cut a CD version of the archive which allows you to install both DosBox and LBA. Since I have a copy of DosBox on my Alienware, its probably possible to configure DosBox to consume the .iso, but I havn’t done this yet. So burn a CD, and XP’s autorun will run the game installer. This gives you instructions as to how to configure he game to run under DosBox. The command line arguments are documented at LBA & DosBox on this site.

LBA running in a dosbox

I boasted about this achievment on my sun, now oracle blog.