Does GLB run on Win98? and some OSX 10.6 issues.

[doimus]

I have switched to Mac as my main development machine and I would like to have GLB in a VirtualBox partition.
Installing full Win XP for a few programs seems like an overkill to me ( I already have Bootcamp XP partition for games etc.) so I was thinking about installing an old copy of Win98SE in VirtualBox and running GLB off that. Will it work?

I'm mainly concerned if VirtualBox supports file/network sharing between OSX and Win98.

[ampos]

 I installed a "lite" version of XP.

[Ian Price]

I was thinking about installing an old copy of Win98SE in VirtualBox and running GLB off that. Will it work?

Why not try it and let us know - I was thinking of doing exactly the same.

[Kitty Hello]

no, for 98 there's some runtimes missing. It works on 2k and NT4, I think.

[doimus]

NT4 is bit too ancient even for my tastes, but might try i just for fun.

I wanted to install 2k as it is my favourite windows version by far, but there is some strange bug/feature that prevents it from being installed to Virtualbox HDD. Installation just goes in an endless loop. Maybe they fixed it in current Virtualbox...


@ampos - what software did you use to "slim down" your XP. I tried that in the past but I just couldn't get it right - something was constantly missing and therefore some crucial piece of software wouldn't run.

[ampos]

I round it in an "underground" site.

[Kitty Hello]

That's the problem with all emulated PCs, no?

[MrTAToad]

Certainly is - its a good test though.  If its playable on an emulator, it should be playable on a proper machine.

[doimus]

I managed to install Win2k (the explanation how to solve the installation bug is in the VirtialBox manual, if someone needs it).

As it seems, 2k is the oldest win version supported by VirtualBox, ie. all the extensions, shared folders and other nice stuff work. Even the seamless mode with Win and OSX desktops together on screen - very cool feature.
What totally and absolutely rocks is that  my OSX "outgoing firewall" (Little snitch) works on virtual OS and even some touchpad gestures are supported, like two finger swipe to scroll, four finger swipe for expose, etc.

What shocked me in the most positive way is the low memory usage of Win2k - freshly installed with SP4, it uses just about 55MB of RAM. Not bad at all for an OS with 98% of XP capabilities.
I forgot how efficient Windows were back in the day.
Just for example, I had to install Firefox 3 (IE5 can't open any pages on the net anymore ) and it, with one tab open, uses more than 40MB of memory. How spoiled we've become.


PS: I've run into slight problem wit compiled app for mac. In short - they don't work. When I run it, nothing happens. Any special settings I have to enable when compiling for OSX universal binary?
I compiled Pong example included with GLB and tried my own simple program - same results.

[Scott_AW]

My desktop still has win2k, it's only SP3 and works great with GLBasic.

On Macs if you use Fullscreen it will crash out.

[doimus]

It's not the fullscreen bug, I've run into that before. This is bare bones "Hello World" app, 640x480, windowed.
This has something to do with either me not enabling whatever options for OSX compiling, or something going on between GLB and OSX 10.6.4 which is my version.

[Scott_AW]

Heres one of my old demos that I tested on a OSX system, I'm not sure of the specific version.
http://host-a.net/scott_aw/RickJason_OSX042310.sit
And a more recent test
http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/shield-breaker-ex/files/mac-version-of-test/download/1505/4304/

These were in the last version of 7.  I think I'm having problems again in 8, however, and haven't updated that at all yet.

[doimus]

I managed to get console apps running with changing file permissions in Terminal (chmod, very new to unixy stuff, deep roots in DOS), but graphic app wanted to download Rosetta (support for legacy PPC software) and then it worked. I thought GLB compiles UB versions?

Is there a way to fix this permissions/Rosetta stuff before giving apps to other people?

[MrTAToad]

I thought GLB compiles UB versions?

As far as I know, it does...  Unless you need Rosetta to run Universal applications... 

[doimus]

Some more stuff:

If I run binary from inside the .app package, ie. MacOSX executable, it runs fine, without restrictions.

If I run the app as a folder, as most Mac apps are run, ie. double-clicking on package name in Finder, it runs in GLB DEMO mode!