2010-04-09, 10:57 PM
I'm sure others can better clue you in. But basically 7 is like Vista on all but the most superficial level (minus some ridiculous bugs / plus some new ones) and anyway Som runs identically (at least nothing is worse) ...if you have a Professional/Ultimate license you can download the "XP Mode" Virtual PC setup from MS's website, but you will still need a working XP disc set in order to add features you probably want like East Asian Languages.
Afaik we're planning to push virtual machines as an all-in-1 recommended solution for everyone (with everything wrapped up in a convenient SDK) but no one is really working on that end (I have my hands pretty full as it is / am not going to be working with editors for a while so...)
So you are on the right track anyway. I can't remember the pros/cons of a 98 vs. 2k vs. XP virtual machine setup. I think 2k and XP are pretty safe, 98 would be nice if it works because I expect it would be a lot less "bloated" (ie. easier to emulate)
EDITED: We can definitely help you with the Virtual PC setup. The major points are you will want MS Gothic on your system and probably East Asian Language support. Then you will want to map your physical harddisk to a network drive on the VM. Copy the registry section for Som over to the vm's registry and change the instDir value so it points to the location on the networked map drive (in other words now you have just one installation of Som shared between your machine and the vm)
PS: We can also help you make a shortcut so you can test your project without going thru the editors (with hardware acceleration / without file lock probs)
Afaik we're planning to push virtual machines as an all-in-1 recommended solution for everyone (with everything wrapped up in a convenient SDK) but no one is really working on that end (I have my hands pretty full as it is / am not going to be working with editors for a while so...)
So you are on the right track anyway. I can't remember the pros/cons of a 98 vs. 2k vs. XP virtual machine setup. I think 2k and XP are pretty safe, 98 would be nice if it works because I expect it would be a lot less "bloated" (ie. easier to emulate)
EDITED: We can definitely help you with the Virtual PC setup. The major points are you will want MS Gothic on your system and probably East Asian Language support. Then you will want to map your physical harddisk to a network drive on the VM. Copy the registry section for Som over to the vm's registry and change the instDir value so it points to the location on the networked map drive (in other words now you have just one installation of Som shared between your machine and the vm)
PS: We can also help you make a shortcut so you can test your project without going thru the editors (with hardware acceleration / without file lock probs)