Set up a virtual machine tailored for gaming.
Set up a virtual machine tailored for gaming.
Hello everyone, I found that certain older titles (especially Knights of the Old Republic I) don't work on Windows 10. I've attempted all possible solutions, but nothing helped. They function perfectly on Linux when Windows Steam is installed via Play On Linux—though my laptop isn't very powerful, and I sometimes need to adjust settings in Kotor. Would it be feasible to run an Ubuntu virtual machine on my main system and use Windows Steam through POL? Or could I run into problems with 3D acceleration? I'm reaching out early since I really don't want to discover this issue later. Cheers, John
installing ubuntu on a virtual machine isn't the issue since you can switch between operating systems. It handles everything automatically—just decide how much storage you allocate. On the VM, you won't receive full power from your laptop because it runs two operating systems simultaneously. For older games, dual boot works fine; I keep my gaming PC on Windows 8.1 for those titles. You can also adjust the file properties to launch games in compatibility modes like Windows 7 or earlier.
Running wine on a virtual machine would be very slow, so it's better to use Windows XP instead.
I want to keep things simple without dealing with partitions or tweaks. My laptop runs Linux with an Ivy Bridge i3 and no graphics card, while my main system is a Haswell i7 with 860MB RAM. Would running virtual machines affect the performance difference between these models?
Sure, just let me know if you choose to dual boot and I'll be happy to assist.
The issue with games in a VM is that graphics need hardware acceleration through the GPU. You could use a spare GPU if available, or try Windows XP inside VirtualBox because the free version includes 3D acceleration and Kotor was popular during that time.
I've tried dual booting before, but it works fine on my other system—just a bit of performance reduction that doesn’t bother me much. Hmm, curious. Since it's a laptop, there aren’t any extra GPUs to worry about. Thinking back, I used to have my old desktop for dual booting, and maybe this is what’s pushing me toward giving it up.