Trying to get TF2 to work on Vmware Fusion 2

[pabrook]

Hey everyone I have a 20" iMac Core 2 Duo with Vmware Fusion 2. The iMac has 4 gb ram. I have turned on the accelerated graphics and have allocated 1024 mb of ram to Windows XP Professional. I have tried both running one and two virtual processors. Everytime I log into Steam and launch Team Fortress 2, it plays the 5 second valve clip, shows one more little brand logo then crashes. I upgraded to vmware fusion 2 today because i read all over the internet that it supports it. I'm not super concerned with frame rates or anything like that. I just want to play the game I just paid for haha. Any suggestions would be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance

-Phil

[admin]

When you say "Crashes", what's crashing? Does the app inside the VM simply dump back to desktop, or does the VM shut down immediately?

Can you give us some more details about your host machine and guest. There are a few key things we need to know:

- What video chip is in your machine

- What version of OSX you're running (Tiger has many serious bugs in the OpenGL stack, we STRONGLY recommend Leopard as it's much more stable)

- What version of XP is running in the guest (we recommend at least SP2)

- Is the XP guest a fresh install, converted from a physical machine or a Parallels VM?

- What exact version of fusion are you running (full version and build number)

- Are there any error messages associated with the crash, either from the application or from fusion itself?

I'm curious because we've had fairly good luck on running all of the Source Engine games on Apple hardware under Fusion. They're some of our favorite games internally

If you could attach the vmware.log from inside your VM bundle immediately after you've gotten it to crash it might contain information that would be useful to us.

[pabrook]

Hey thanks for the quick response. Alright, I'll answer your questions to the best of my ability. When I said it was crashing, it would just drop down as if it was being minimized but nothing would happen and nothing would stay in the task bar. The VM ran fine afterward, just no TF2.

Video Chip: ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT 128mb

OSX: Leopard (10.5.6)

Guest: XP Professional Version 2002 Service Pack 2

It was a fresh install, hoping that you mean that I installed it for Vmware Fusion 1 and have just recently updated to Vmware Fusion 2. I have not used boot camp or parallels.

Version of Vmware Fusion: Version 2.0.1 (128865)

No error messages since the update to fusion 2. Before that, it said that i needed a video card that supported shaders.

The last part with the vmware.log, where exactly could I find this? I would be happy to do so but I do not know where to find vmware's log.

Thanks for your help,

Phil

[admin]

The vmware.log file is stored in the VM bundle. From the Fusion VM Library, you can Right Click (or Control-Click if you've got a single button mouse) the VM in the left pane and then select "Show in Finder" and it'll pop up a finder window with the contents. I'd like for you to start the VM, run TF2 until it crashes, power down the VM and then attach the vmware.log file from that folder. Don't power on the VM again until you've attached the log and submitted the reply otherwise it'll get overwritten.

There's a couple more things you can check on your end:

- Did you install the new guest tools that are included in Fusion 2.0.1? They're neccessary to get 3D support.

- Did you do a "hardware upgrade" for the VM, we added a lot of new functionality to Fusion 2.0.1, some if it required changes to our device emulation layer so you'll need to do an "Upgrade Virtual Machine" with the VM powered off to take advantage of that.

- If you run "dxdiag" from within the guest (start->run->"dxdiag"), can you run the Direct3D tests on the display page? Do you have any other 3D applications you can try to run in the guest?

Hope that helps

[pabrook]

Is the new guest tools different than VM Tools? I installed the new VM Tools as described in the .pdf walkthrough on the vmware website to properly upgrade the program. That was all done in a step by step fashion. I just tried to get the vmware.log, through the finder there were 4, labeled 0, 1, 2, 3, here is the one that updated itself as I was trying to run the game.

Ok, I did the dxdiag tests. Here are some screenshots from what I saw. Is it possible that I need to install the actual driver from the Mac side on the Windows side? It just says its a generic VMVGA, maybe I need to go to the manufacturer of my videocard's website and download it for Windows? Or, there is probably a reason why my video card comes up as vmvga or whatever because it is emulated by the VM.

Ok, so with all of this, I hope this could help. Let me know if you want any other screen shots of settings because that may be the best way for yu or anyone to see whats going on in my computer.

Phil

[pabrook]

Is the new guest tools different than VM Tools? I installed the new VM Tools as described in the .pdf walkthrough on the vmware website to properly upgrade the program. That was all done in a step by step fashion. I just tried to get the vmware.log, through the finder there were 4, labeled 0, 1, 2, 3, here is the one that updated itself as I was trying to run the game.

Ok, I did the dxdiag tests. Here are some screenshots from what I saw. Is it possible that I need to install the actual driver from the Mac side on the Windows side? It just says its a generic VMVGA, maybe I need to go to the manufacturer of my videocard's website and download it for Windows? Or, there is probably a reason why my video card comes up as vmvga or whatever because it is emulated by the VM.

Ok, so with all of this, I hope this could help. Let me know if you want any other screen shots of settings because that may be the best way for yu or anyone to see whats going on in my computer.

Phil

[pabrook]

Trying to get the log to work

[admin]

There's the problem, it looks like the video driver for the SVGA device didn't install correctly. Can you try completely removing the Guest tools from the guest (I think thats in add/remove programs), rebooting the guest, and then reinstalling them. You'll notice that 3D acceleration is shown as unavailable in DXDiag. You're also running the default VGA driver that ships with windows rather than our SVGA driver. While you're at it, make sure that 3D support is enabled for your guest in the VM settings dialog.

Guest Tools are indeed the same thing as the VM Tools. The video card the guest sees should be a "VMware SVGA II". We present a virtual video card so that you can move the VM to a different host and still have video support on that machine even if the physical video card is from a different vendor. It's not possible to install the video card for the physical video adapter because the guest isn't able to access it directly.

[pabrook]

That worked! Thanks so much for your help! Quick question though. Having a Dual Core iMac, should I use the 2 virtual processors option for better performance? What would be the potential drawbacks of using that setup if I would use that?

Thanks again!

Phil

[admin]

Good to hear.

In general, you should leave some processors around for the host to use. We don't recommend 2 VCPUs for machines with less than 4 cores. As it is, we try to run the graphics backend on a different core than the VM (which is why you might see vmware-vmx taking close to 200% of your available CPU time).