I've got a crazy idea to try running MoI on an Acer Aspire One netbook with Linpus Linux (Fedora 8) via the latest version of VirtualBox. I currently do a lot of work on a graphics challenged SIS 650 based PC and with the new browser I find I can manage with the lowly graphics power quite easily. I'm thinking that the little Acer might just be up to it.

My reason for trying this is that with house renovations and a rampaging 1 year old boy, I'm finding it impossible to access my desktop PC. I could work quietly at night with the Aspire One.

The Aspire One uses Intel 945GSE chipset. Is that enough to run MoI? Is the 1024*600 display likely to cause any trouble?

Hi Mark,

> The Aspire One uses Intel 945GSE chipset. Is that enough to run MoI?

Yup, although it is on the low end side of the spectrum, that is normally enough to run MoI although it is not really suitable for more complex projects.

However, I'm not quite sure what the case will be in a virtualized environment like you plan to use. It's possible that the virtualization will add some amount of additional overhead of its own, basically making that low-end card even less powered. But still that by itself is probably not the biggest problem.


> Is the 1024*600 display likely to cause any trouble?

Well, it's not a whole lot of room to work with for graphics-oriented applications in general, but MoI is actually able to run pretty well on that resolution. One cool feature of MoI is that the UI is scalable under Options / General / UI size.

The way the side pane UI hides different chunks of UI when you switch palettes keeps things going pretty well on these low res screens. I recently got a netbook as well, an Asus NJ-10 and it has that same resolution although with an nVidia graphics card in it, and I was able to run MoI well on it, although a larger screen is generally useful though.


Your biggest problem will probably be glitches in VirtualBox's Direct3D emulation layer - providing 3D hardware acceleration is I think a brand new function that came with the latest version of VirtualBox. In other virtual environments, the initial introduction of Direct3D emulation has tended to be pretty unstable and improved over some time. I would just not be surprised if this was the case with VirtualBox as well.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Thanks as always for the comprehensive & speedy reply to what was a pretty niche question! MoI has been without doubt the best level of support in a software purchase I have ever had.

I'm looking forward to trying this out now, even if it does turn out to be a bit clunky. The Linux version of the Aspire One uses solid state drive with low read/write speeds, bad enough that straight install of XP really requires upgrade to proper HD or faster SSD. No chance of that as the machine belongs to my wife and she is fond of her netbook the way it is! My needs are generally modest though and I'm used to underpowered equipment. I will probably put the virtual machine on a fast SD card.

I will let you know how it goes.

Hi Mark, also some more notes on this.

It looks like you may have to do some manual tweaking inside of VirtualBox to enable 3D hardware support:

http://www.virtualbox.org/manual/UserManual.html#guestadd-3d



So that is not very encouraging that it is labeled as "still experimental at this time"... but maybe you will be lucky...

You'll probably want to make sure you have the most recent release of VirtualBox to have the best chance.

- Michael

Thanks for the extra info Michael. I have downloaded the most recent binary for Fedora 8. I need the binary rather than compiling from source as I *think* usb support is closed source. I have a good tutorial for getting VirtualBox going on Aspire One (had to download kernal source, dev environment (not installed by default) etc, etc). I should be good to go I think. Hopefully this time tomorrow I'll be able to say whether or not it flew :)

Hi Michael,

Sadly, as you predicted, it didn't fly :(

I got direct3d enabled. Ran dxdiag and the spinning cube for the dx9 test worked OK. Fired up MoI and it gave an error something like "Incompatible Hardware: ... 24bit depth from an 8 bit palette". Seems the directx in VirtualBox does need to mature a bit.

Oh well, I will try again at the next version.

Hi Mark, you might double check what is set as the color depth on the Windows desktop.

If it was set to something like 16-bit or something like that rather than full 32-bit that might be the problem.

That particular error meant that the Direct3D system reported back an error when MoI asked it to check if a depth buffer was supported with 24-bits for depth and 8-bits for stencil.

Right now MoI requires that particular depth format, and actually every single 3D graphics card that I have seen has supported it and it is commonly used for games, so that is kind of surprising that it would not be supported.

But it may not be supported only when you have your desktop set to a lower color depth, so that's why you may want to check that.

Otherwise, maybe it would be possible for MoI to support a different depth/stencil format if that is not available rather than just bailing out. If you want to e-mail me (moi@moi3d.com) I can send you a small DXCapsViewer.exe program from the DX SDK, which would let you see all the possible depth modes that are supported on that emulated video card.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

It was about 2:30AM this morning when I gave up on it so my recollections are a bit blurry.

I have had some difficulty making resolution & colour depth "stick" under VirtualBox using the VirtualBox video driver. Others have had similar trouble it seems (not Aspire One specific). It tends to drop back to 4 bit & 640*480 on re-boot (sometimes other resolutions). However, I have found that using a Ctrl-G or Ctrl-F seems to force usage of the driver and restores the different display modes.

I am pretty certain XP was telling me it was runnung in 1024*600 & 32-bit when I tested DX & when I tried MoI. It should have been OK but reported the error.

Many thanks for your continued help Michael. I have sent an email and will try that diagnostic tool when you are able to send it :)

Hi again Michael,

I have run the DXCapsViewer. I took the following steps:

1. Confirmed that desktop is showing 1024*600 @ 32-bit in display properties
2. Ran DXDiag which shows Direct3D = enabled
3. Ran the DXDiag direct 3D tests. DX7 is not supported. DX8 & DX9 tests pop up a VirtualBox message box which says "The virtual machine window is optimized to work in 32 bit color mode but the color quality of the virtual display is currently set to 16 bit. Please open the display properties dialog of the guest OS and select a 32 bit color mode, if it is available, for best possible performance of the virtual video subsystem." Checked display properties and it still says 1024*600 @ 32-bit. Despite the warnings, got spinning 3D cube for each test.
4. Ran DXCapsViewer. Under "Adapter Formats - Depth/Stencil formats" = nil entries. All Depth/Stencil formats lists are completely empty!

Not looking too promising :(

Hi Mark, no it doesn't look very good...

Seems like multiple things going wrong - it seems to be confused internally about what color depth is on the screen and it looks like the parts of the Direct3D API that are supposed to report back information about what the device supports are busted.

Hopefully that will improve as they continue to work on Direct3D support inside of VirtualBox.

That was labeled as "experimental" so it is not really surprising that it is not really up to par yet.

Other virtual machine systems have had similar issues in their first pass at trying to support having the virtualized software interface with the 3D display hardware.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I'm going to post a message to the VirtualBox forum and see what they say. From a bit of web surfing VirtualBox appears to be using Wine3D. I don't know if these issues also happen with Wine or how far up with recent Wine developments the latest VirtualBox release is.

I will let you know if they can tell me anything interesting.

As a postscript to all this, I have managed to get Windows XP to run from a USB stick on my wife's Fedora based Aspire One netbook by using BartPE.

I had to jump through some hoops slipstreaming SP2 with my SP1 XP CD so I could get DX9. I had to copy NTDETECT.com form Server 2003 SP1 to the root of my USB stick (BartPE is completely unstable from USB without it, great with it!) as well as several other steps. I also have to install the Aspire One XP drivers for chipset & video after XP boots using a special BartPE "plugin".

With all that done, MoI works great from the USB stick on this little netbook. Performance seems really good compared to the SIS650 on my desktop & screen size/resolution has proved to be a non-issue. Thanks Michael for making it easy to run MoI from a USB stick :)

I need to get a netbook of my own now that I've proved to myself that I can live with the netbook format. I'd like a Dell Mini 10. I can afford a Eee 701! How do you think MoI would run on one of those Michael (Intel GMA900 (915?) gfx & 900Mhz Celeron M)?

Hi Mark,

> How do you think MoI would run on one of those Michael
> (Intel GMA900 (915?) gfx & 900Mhz Celeron M)?

Well, that GMA900 is pretty much on the extreme low end of the pile as far as graphics horsepower goes.

So it will likely bog down quite a bit if you have too much stuff in your scene all at once.

But if you keep to lighter density models, the graphics card would probably work.

Probably the bigger problem would be that the screen on the Eee 701 is actually significantly less in resolution than with the Aspire One that you have been working with so far.

The Eee 701 seems to only have a 7 inch, 800x480 resolution screen, which is likely just too small. MoI is pretty much designed for a minimum of 1024 pixels in horizontal resolution - with only an 800 pixel width you are going to have some problems like having a scroll bar on the bottom toolbar.

So I really would not recommend that.

- Michael