VRPC on Linux with WINE - comp.sys.acorn.misc

Message from discussion VRPC on Linux with WINE

Theo Markettos

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More options 18 Mar, 11:15

Newsgroups: comp.sys.acorn.misc

From: Theo Markettos <theom+n...@chiark.greenend.org.uk>

Date: 18 Mar 2008 11:15:29 +0000 (GMT)

Local: Tues 18 Mar 2008 11:15

Subject: VRPC on Linux with WINE

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I haven't seen it reported anywhere, so I thought I'd relate that I've got
Virtual RiscPC Adjust working on WINE in Linux (Ubuntu Gutsy).

It was fairly straightforward to do, though helped by the fact that I
already had it installed in a Windows XP Tablet partition on the same
machine. I just symlinked the start of that partition to ~/.wine/drive_c
and then did:
$ wine c:/RISCOS/VirtualRiscPC-Adjust/VirtualRPC-Adjust.exe
which is the path on the Windows partition with \ replaced by /

and it ran. Seemed to be a bit slow at starting up (spends ages at the RISC
OS splashscreen), but once it's running I get between 20-70 MIPS (Centrino
1.6GHz, NVidia GEForce 5200 with closed-source drivers). Generally the
scheduling is much better than Windows (sometimes when VRPC is running
Windows slows to a crawl, which doesn't happen on Linux+WINE). VRPC still
crashes on exit, just as it does in Windows (WINE tells me there's a page
fault, if anyone from VA is interested in the log)

There are a few bits of display corruption where WINE doesn't draw the top
and bottom of the window correctly but they don't affect RISC OS usage too
much. Audio kind-of works, but is a bit distorted.

On boot I get some errors about Shared C Library out of date (don't know
what's causing that, the same VRPC install works on Windows) and the battery
being low (I suspect WINE doesn't emulate the battery monitoring calls) but
otherwise it's fine. It manages to run Firefox (1.5) successfully so that's
a fairly good workout.

Gratuitous screenshots:
http://www.markettos.org.uk/ephemeral/vrpc-ubuntu-wine.png
http://www.markettos.org.uk/ephemeral/vrpc-ubuntu-wine-tw.png

I did try to run it without the Windows partition - WINE started claiming it
wanted things like MFC42.DLL. These things are usually fixable by fiddling
around with WINE and downloading various DLLs from Microsoft, but I just
took the easy option and used my existing Windows install. Interestingly
the copy protection didn't kick in, so evidently WINE's emulating the
network MAC address correctly.

Theo

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