Topic: Vista users.. Need testers to verify Vista Fix for Dynaverse

[Age]

I admire all the work you guys are doing on this especailly Pestalence, Bonk and SFHQ.I am glad I don't have Vista yet if I do I am getting another HDD with it on my system.

[Bonk]

Come now, SFHQ has been very helpful too don't exclude him. But thank you for recognising our efforts, I don't want to seem ungracious.

And now I feel guilty for giving up on it for now. I had all the settings in and was getting the firewall message every time for the last 20 or so tries. Tonight, I set everything back to normal (including restoring the original dlls), got through the firewall check once, then got a countdown on server login, refreshed the list, logged in, got three normal movements and then the lag resumed.

I'm not making any progress here. I'm going to take a break from vista testing. (often if I step back from something for a time a light will come on later with insight not obtainable through the brute force trial and error attempts of the last few days)

I'm going to set up XP and Kubuntu on this laptop (after calling Toshiba to grill them on its BIOS), establish working clients on both so I'll be ready to setup a temporary forge server over the weekend. I also have commitments to work on the gargantuan task of updating this website. Then I have my own server to take care of, the sprites file, the serverkit and EAW source projects, and consultation on another upcoming server or two. I need to move on for now.

Pestalence and SFHQ have been having more success than I, and may just crack this yet.

[Bonk]

Dammit, my XP install disk sees one 130GB partition on the disk, where Vista sees four separate partitions and 35GB unpartitioned space (I allocated 20GB for XP and 15GB for Kubuntu). See attached image. Dammit, Toshiba has done something funky to this disk and OS, well what can you expect for $400, I guess I can't complain too much. I should have built a real computer.

I'm going to take my chances and try a Kubuntu install, GRUB should still be able to see the Vista partition, that is if it can see the same partitions that Vista sees. (in particular the unpartitioned space I want to install to.) I know I can run OP on Wine mostly, and if it comes to running an XP VM on one OS or the other then so be it. But I get the sneaking suspicion that the machine will bork if I do install Kubuntu/GRUB. See that 1.46 MB EISA configuration partition? I suspect that is the on-disk bios. I called Toshiba and grilled them, the poor little girl had no idea when I asked her if there was a proper on-chip bios on the mainboard, it took her five minutes to ask her supervisor, but answered that the BIOS is on the mainboard.

Oh wait, maybe my best bet is to go with WUBI, it would save me the hassle of having to run the restore disks and re-installing all my stuff if a proper Kubuntu install to a ext3 partition borks the system. WUBI's virtual filesystem will slow disk access somewhat, but it still has real hardware access otherwise. I think that is what I will do, I'll extend the Vista partition to it's original size to fill the unallocated space and then Install Kubuntu via WUBI.

[Bonk]

Insyde H₂O Setup Utility ... this is not a traditional BIOS, from what I can gather, to get real access to the hard disk I would have to buy a licence for their framework and obtain a suitable development platform to re-write the Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI, aka "pseudo-BIOS") in order to enable traditional hard disk access that allows mutiple bootable partitions. It is as I thought, and the peons at Toshiba support (and their supervisors) have no clue. 

So Wubi it is! Good thing such a product is available.

Now if only I could get Vista to stop insisting on displaying every folder as a pictures folder... I don't want a damn rating column I want file type,date,size,owner,attributes etc. in details view for all folders all the time, when I set it in Explorer...Tools...Options...View...ApplyToAllFolders, Vista simply ignores my request and happily displays tiles of text files, archives, whatever (even the administrative tools section of the control panel) - as pictures with date taken and ratings columns... Sheesh, what a mess. 

[toasty0]

Maybe this might help: http://www.winvistaclub.com/Ultimate_Windows_Tweaker.html

[Bonk]

Maybe this might help: http://www.winvistaclub.com/Ultimate_Windows_Tweaker.html

Thanks toasty0, I had a look at that when you posted it in engineering, I concluded that I had already found all of the settings it tweaks in Vista's own interfaces.

I'm on to QEMU / QEMU manager now (will check/update free software thread).

Edit: already have it in there: http://www.dynaverse.net/forum/index.php/topic,163350078.msg1122852161.html#msg1122852161

I'm going to set up an XP VM in Vista with QEMU Manager.

[Bonk]

Poop, QEMU does not work on Vista. VMWare Server it is then.

[Pestalence_XC]

Bonk.. XP will be severely limited in VM Server.. Video capped to 8 MB, Networking a nightmare to configure out of VM Server.

Add this to Vista and it's controls.. I couldn't get it configured to get a server kit online or even to play TCP/IP for OP, much less turning Models on in the SFC.ini, the game wouldn't load.. not enough vid memory..

maybe I was doing something wrong, or maybe the VM I was using (I was using the latest from MS).


What model Toshiba are you using?

I have 3 laptops here from the Satellite series.. 2 were built for XP and 1 for Vista.. they have chipped Bios on the main board.. but then again these are $1800 to $2500 laptops, designed to be a portable desktop.

Of all the Toshiba lines, I would take yours back and get a Satellite series.

[Bonk]

My laptop: Satellite L300D - 01Q (PSLC0C-01Q08C)

I'll play with VMware Server for a bit to see what I get, if no joy then I'll look at other virtualisation solutions like Sun's VirtualBox, but it is x86 host only I think and this Satellite is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor TK-57 @ 1.9 GHz.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_virtual_machines

If I can find nothing that works I can eventually retrieve my old PIII XP system from my father's shed.

[Pestalence_XC]

OK Bonk.. good news and bad.

Good News.. the system does have a Bios Chip.

Bad news, it is a Toshiba memory stamped Award / Phoenix Bios or AMD Bios.. meaning only Toshiba can make a Bios update for it and Toshiba has no bios update.

Different ways to enter the Bios on Toshiba (By model)

Toshiba® 335 CDS         ESC 

Toshiba Protege        ESC 

Toshiba Satellite 205 CDS      F1

Toshiba Tecra        ESC then F1 or F2

Toshiba Notebook [Newer models] (possibly yours)

 1. Turn on computer by Holding down power button while pressing the ESC key.
The machine will beep, then display:
Check System, then press [F1] key.
2. Release ESC key
3. Press F1 key
 

Different ways to enter the Bios (by chip vendor)

ALR Advanced Logic Research, Inc. ® PC / PCI                 F2 

ALR PC non / PCI                              CTRL+ALT+ESC 

AMD® (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.) BIOS               F1 

AMI (American Megatrends, Inc.) BIOS                     DEL

Award™ BIOS                                      CTRL+ALT+ESC 

Award BIOS                                                  DEL 

DTK® (Datatech Enterprises Co.) BIOS                      ESC

Phoenix™ BIOS                                         CTRL+ALT+ESC

Phoenix BIOS                                            CTRL+ALT+S   (This is pretty common on Toshiba as well)

Phoenix BIOS                                          CTRL+ALT+INS 

[Bonk]

Yeah, I have full access to the EFI "pseudo-BIOS" (as I call it) - F2 at startup, but the problem is that it is not a real bios, boot from a bootable CD, and it will not see the same partitions that Vista sees - this is a "Windows BIOS" (see the Insyde H₂O propaganda).

But wait, I had ReactOS working a while ago on this Vista install, bundled with QEMU. So I should be able to get QEMU working with a little more fiddling (I was using 0.9.1 for my test XP vm, perhaps that ReactOS dist uses 0.9.0).

I do not like this new VMware Server at all - Apache Tomcat application server! WTF? No wonder performance is an issue, a java application server is a retarded way to implement hardware virtualisation, totally retarded. I'm setting up XP with it now, but might just stop short of completion and go back to QEMU, a real VM solution.

Ya, that's it VMware server goes directly to the incinerator of all poorly designed applications. I feel violated. Ugh.

[FCM_SFHQ_XC]

Well pretty much my week I had is now up, I'll be able to continue with Vista OP experiments when I'm back for several weeks on a proper connection in about 15 to 17 days from now(and I'll have several weeks as well, not just 1)

Out of curiosity Bonk, I noticed that indeed your getting the firewall message more often then I or Pesty, do you think it might be due to the differences in networking of Vista Home Premium and Vista Ultimate? I know Home Premium doesn't come with the Business networking, which seems to be more stable overall then the "home" networking builds of Home Basic and Home Premium.

[Bonk]

I don't doubt that networking may have been crippled in Vista Home Premium, it is entirely possible. Though it could be my new router (my old reliable one is in dad's shed as well), the new Linksys firmwares are just a little too fancy for my liking. I have just adjusted the MTU from Auto to Manual (1500) on it, that may make a difference. I'm not done with this yet, but I'm going to give QEMU another go before going back to Vista testing.

[Bonk]

Aha, QEMU 0.9.0 Does work on Vista, it seems something was added in 0.9.1 that breaks it. I'm installing XP in a QEMU 0.9.0 virtual machine I set up with QEMU Manager 5.0 now.

[Bonk]

QEMU is surprisingly fast running XP Pro is places, painfully slow in others. Installing XP SP2 now... It is nice in that as I set up the VM as a single processor 32 bit machine -  it only occupies one core on the host, so I am free to do stuff on the host OS while the guest is running.

The networking setup is completely transparent, and works very fast.

There are a few quirks; it does not seem to want to accept a double click, choppy sound, only takes the physical CD at boot and no easy facility to transfer files between the host and guest. I ended up installing TightVNC on the guest XP installation and using its file transfer utility to copy over the XP SP2 installer.

Once I have SP2 installed and a little windows configuration done I will try installing OP. I'll keep you posted.

This VM might outperform my old PIII system.

[Bonk]

Well, OP will not run in my QEMU XP VM (no 3D). But Artifex will. So at least I can edit maps. I intend to create an OpenOffice spreadsheet to edit text maps and then use Artifex to convert them to binary to load on the server. So that is some progress at least.

By setting my laptop to the DMZ and manually setting the MTU I seem to be able to get past the firewall check now. Still get the slow movement and whatnot though. I'm digging around for a newer copy of smartheap but can't seem to find one anywhere. I suppose I could write to them and beg for a copy to test with. Perhaps a newer quicksilver game might include it, I'll look into that.

If there is a will there is a way.

[Bonk]

I did find a newer version of smartheap (shw32.dll) on my old hard disk - v 6.0.2.58 - instead of the version 6.0.0.3 that ships with OP and SFC3 - but it made no significant difference. It would be nice to find a version 7,8 or 9 of smartheap to try though.

I just had the idea of using a directplay "proxy" app like dxport, or perhaps writing one of our own. I'm going to give dxport a whirl and see what I get.

[Bonk]

Well DXport seems to work as advertised (even on Vista!), but it does not resolve our OP Dynaverse lag issues. Good to know DXport works on Vista though.

[toasty0]

I don't mean to sounds like sour grapes here, but I don't remember the lag issue being so hot under XP either.

[Bonk]

Just to clarify, this is not in-mission lag we're talking about. It is on the map, in supply, the shipyard and at login. e.g. with movement set to 3 seconds on the server a movement on the map running the OP client on Vista can take up to 2 minutes. Or in supply the client never updates after pressing the "done" button. Or taking multiple attempts to get past the firewall check, and very slow login and map load... etc.

On the Dynaverse, the mechanics of the in mission game are exactly the same as regular tcp/ip (lan,gamespy,SFC Direct) games, the only difference being that the host's (drafter) mission script reports results to the Dynaverse server.

Apologies in advance if I have stated the obvious.

Have you observed the kind of lag we're talking about in the OP client in XP? (I have not.) If so, the information could be helpful in identifying the root cause of the Dynaverse interface lag on Vista.