Running within a VM

Support
1

Hey guys,

First up, GREAT work on the demo, I’ve been playing it a heap but there’s just one thing holding me back from getting the pre-order at the moment. Ideally I’d REALLY like to run this on my main machine, a Mac laptop, under a virtual machine as the PC I’m currently using isn’t my main machine and not with me much of the time etc.

I understand that its going to be next to impossible to port over natively, but I thought it should stand a good chance of running within a VM. I’ve setup XP (from scratch) on a clean VirtualBox VM with 2D and 3D acceleration enabled (D3D drivers installed) and Automation installed cleanly on this. It gets passed the Pixel Shader check etc, but when running I just get the splash screen followed by an error saying:
“Failed to start Automation. Attempted to read or write to protected memory. This is often an indication that other memory is corrupt.”
At which point it quits out.

I was just wondering if there’s anyway to debug or get a stack trace that might help in diagnosing this? Strangely enough, I got this exact message on my (working) PC once, but restarting fixed the problem. I’ve also tried all the usual VM stuff that can cause problems, switching off nested paging, VT-x etc.
If I can get things working, I’d be happy to write up a step by step for how others can get this running.

Thanks for any help you can give and, again, top work on the game.

2

Zeussy reckons he’s tried it on virtualbox before himself and hasn’t had luck with getting it going. He’ll give you a more detailed answer when he gets a moment :slight_smile:

3

Sweet I’ll keep an eye out. Thanks

BTW, saw you were a Melbourne dev. I love supporting local people so bought the pre-order anyway :slight_smile:

4

I am using Windows 7 (under Parallels) on my MacBook Pro
Which is OS X 10.7.4 (Lion).
I have not had any issues with the engine demo of Automation not working (so far). :smiley:
I am planning on when I get the extra money pre-ordering Automation. :slight_smile:

If you can get Parallels for your Mac, then run Windows XP (SP2) or higher on it, then you should be ok.
I hope that helps.

5

For what it’s worth (and for anyone else attempting this) I tried EVERYTHING to make this work under VirtualBox and then gave up. I converted my VBox image to Parallels (ie it was exactly the same Windows installation, same version of Automation, same drivers etc) booted up and it ran first time, so unquestionably this is an issue with VBox.