VMWare and Virtual PC: Playing Age of Empires on Windows 7

Recently, I decided to install Age of Empires on my computers.  The game came up in a conversation with someone who periodically hosts AOE parties.  Anyway, it was one of the few PC games I played growing up, and also one that my wife used to play.  When I got home, I discovered that, indeed, I did still have the original discs for Age of Empires, the Age of Kings Expansion, and Age of Emprires II.  I believe my sister salvaged them for me from the boxes left when my parents moved from a house to an apartment.

In any case, I had the software that I needed, so I installed it on my wife's PC running Windows XP.  That done, I had a couple of old PCs running Windows 2000, but those are on the same KVM with my wife's PC, so they couldn't be used for multi-player.  The problem was Windows 7.  I had heard that it wouldn't be pretty (you have to shut down Explorer to play), so I decided to virtualize.  That way, I wouldn't need to give up any part of Windows 7, even Aero, and it would run seamlessly.

I had used VMWare before, so that's what I started with.  VMWare Player is free to download, and so I did.  The installation went pretty smoothly.  I chose to install the option to install the OS using the VMWare wizard, which turned out to be a problem later on when I had to manually eject the virtual floppy drive in order to be able to install VMWare Tools (VMWare thought that the OS installation wasn't complete, when it was.)  Next time, I'll choose the option to install the OS after creating a blank virtual machine.

After installing the OS (I used the original XP that came with my laptop), I updated to SP3, and then had Windows Update install all of the latest patches.  Once everything was updated, I installed the Age of Empires games and applied the appropriate patches.  I also created a small subset in my list of software suitable for a minimalist virtual machine. 

After that, I was good to go, so my wife and I fired up the game and played a few matches.  We had to brush up on our skills first, but it didn't take us long to get back into the swing of things.

I used Bridged mode for networking, but even so, I had to disable Windows Firewall on the XP VM in order to host an AOE game, even after creating a firewall exception, and expanding it to the whole subnet.

Of course, it wasn't perfect.  Even though I had VMWare Tools installed, the mouse was a bit unresponsive, and VMWare Player tends to release the mouse if you cross the edge of the screen.  For this reason, and because I also wanted to try another option for virtualization that I hadn't used before, I decided to also try out Virtual PC. 

It took some doing to find the download link for the latest version of Virtual PC.  I think that Microsoft doesn't want anyone running Windows 7 Home Premium (which is what I have on my laptop) to find the file.  I kept being redirected to Microsoft Virtual PC 2007, which is the appropriate version if your host operating system is Windows XP or Vista, or to upgrade to Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate.  I finally found the right link for Windows Virtual PC, which only supports Windows 7 as a host OS.  This is also the basis of Windows 7's Windows XP Mode.  Indeed, when I installed Windows Virtual PC on my Windows 7 Home Premium, it created a link in the Start Menu for Windows XP Mode.

The link doesn't work (it only displays a message that it won't work in this edition of Windows), and the only other item in the Windows Virtual PC start menu folder opens a folder.  At first, I couldn't figure out how to create a virtual machine in this folder, but then I noticed the bar at the top of the folder window.  When I created a new virtual machine, it stored only a small data file in that folder, with the virtual disk files buried out of sight in my hidden AppData folder.  This approach is different from that of VMWare, and it reflects the fact that Microsoft does not expect me to move this VM, back it up, or access its underlying files.  It's supposed to "just work", and I'm supposed to treat this small VMCX file as a proxy for the whole VM.  With VMWare, I can easily move or back up the VM by moving or copying the folder containing all of its files: to a different drive, or even a different machine. 

Windows Virtual PC with the Integration Tools installed has almost perfect mouse movement, which is essential for playing a real-time strategy game such as AOE.  It wasn't difficult to get used to hitting Ctrl+Alt+Left to escape input capture, instead of VMWare's Ctrl+Alt.

I do have a license for Windows 7 Ultimate, so I would like to check out Windows XP Mode.  However, this license is currently installed on our living room media PC.  It will take a few hours to set up, so it will probably have to be a free afternoon on a weekend.  If I installed the key currently on my laptop on the media PC, I might be able to use "Anytime Upgrade" to install the newly-unused Ultimate key to my laptop without doing a re-install.  We'll see.

Triple-Booting

For a short period of time I was triple-booting on my laptop with Gentoo Linux, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. I compiled Linux from scratch and got everything working and set up, even the WiFi card, but in the end, it wasn't worth it to have to keep rebooting to switch operating systems, especially since the applications I used most were exactly the same across each platform: Firefox and Gaim. I kept XP around because my printer isn't supported in Vista. After a week of rebooting just to print, and dealing with Windows file permissions hell, and keeping files synchronized across three operating systems, I decided to wipe the hard drive and just go with Vista. If I want to print, I can print from Athena in Linux. The main benefit from the end user perspective of Vista is its pretty interface. There's a lot that's changed under the covers, but chances are most users aren't going to notice that so much, especially in day-to-day use. Mostly I installed Linux to prove to myself that it could be done. My laptop is relatively new hardware, and I wanted to see how the process of getting off the ground worked. I don't think Linux is a good OS choice for a laptop. A desktop or server, yes, but not a laptop. Linux was not meant to be turned on and off all the time and adjust to its environment on the fly. Windows XP Windows Vista Gentoo Linux with GNOME desktop Gentoo Linux with KDE desktop, just for show: this is the default without any customizations, since I didn't really use KDE.

Widescreen

No, that's not my Linux box, though for about a day I did have Gentoo installed, and I'll probably make another go at it at some point in the future. I've been pretty busy lately. I'll try not to keep posting just Windows things on a blog that's supposedly about my Linux box. If you'll notice though, the windows_installs directory is hosted on a Samba share on Athena. See, they can play nice together.

I also have Vista beta on another partition on this computer, but there aren't Vista drivers for most of the hardware, most notably it doesn't recognize the screen as a wide screen, so Vista is pretty much a no-go until Dell, nVidia, and/or Microsoft gets their act together on that.

Here's a snapshot of my desktop. The screen is much brighter and crisper than my old laptop. It's actually only 80 pixels wider than my old laptop screen (and 150 pixels shorter), so in some ways it can feel a bit cramped vertically. I think the pixels are about the same size physically. I'm adjusting and experimenting with different ways to arrange things, for example, the icons across the top and bottom are a holdover from my 1600x1200 days. I used to put the web browser just below the top row of icons, but now I tend to put it over them slightly. I'm thinking of moving them more toward the side of the screen.

Gaim 1.5 had a bug that made it crash when signing on to the MSN Messenger service (apparently MSN changed the way they did logins, and it exposed the bug) so I installed the beta 2.0 version of Gaim, and I like what they're doing with it. The new sounds are a big improvement: much less abrasive. They also have a "Psychic mode" plugin that looks like it'll be fun to play around with.... (Note: I have obscured some screennames in case there's a stalker or an IM spammer with an OCR-bot.)

The new computer is quite snappy; it starts up fast, and goes in and out of sleep without problems. The speakers are awesome: in fact, this is the perfect laptop for watching widescreen video on, which I have done. Another nice feature is the built-in card reader. A single slot takes SD/MMC/MS/Pro/xD cards.

Vista Beta: That Was Quick

I finally got fed up with all the slowness. I have 512MB of RAM and a 2.0GHz Pentium 4, and I was having trouble doing more than one task at a time, and that's with all the indexing and Windows Defender off. It was pretty, but my CPU was at 100% most of the time swapping out a 900+ MB page file. Everything is back to normal thanks to my external hard drive and a stack of CD-ROMs. Just my luck though, the day after I reinstall everything they come out with a new version of OpenOffice.org (2.0.3) and MSIE 7 Beta (3).