1036
Holy zarking kwonk, can you believe I actually
tried to run RA2 again?? What a fool.
I found yet another copy, and it seemed
to work slightly differently when I ran it in Windows, which gave me hope (of
the false variety, it was revealed later).
Copied it onto the Linux computer, ran
it (they always run, that’s not the problem), and, as usual, the game menu was
all blank.
Aaaargh, why am I doing this to myself??
And the insanity doesn’t even end there! I’m now following a guide (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN1MWBa3yiw, but I’m attempting Win11 rather than 10 because I’m an idiot) to run Windows in a virtual machine to see if I can fool/force Linux into running RA2 properly.
Important: when VirtualBox is running the ISO, rightclick on the little ‘network’ icon at the bottom of the window (two computer monitors overlaid?, then click “NEtwork Settings…” and change the dropdown menu to “not attached”. We DO NOT want Win11 to be able to access the internet (see below)
This install was actually the first time I’ve hit the moronic Win11-needs-internet roadblock (having always used a Rufus-made stick to bypass it previously) so it was the first time I’ve had the joy of hitting Shift + F10 to bring up a command prompt, and then enter OOBE\BYPASSNRO (case insensitive). This restarts the virtual machine and makes the option “I don’t have internet” appear. Zark off, Microsoft.
Guide for getting through that nonsense:
https://archive.ph/gDE9f
As an amusing aside, this is actually the first ever time that this old HP AIO has run Windows 11!
Anyway, how did it go? Can you guess?
That’s right: obviously, it didn’t work.
It was even more of a failure than just running it in Linux. (sigh)
Because I’m not quite done with punching myself in the head, I’m going to try a Windows 7 virtual machine next, so for the hell of it. Obviously, again, this isn’t going well, and the installation has already frozen once twice (requiring a ‘restart’ of the machine). And then it failed utterly. I’ll try Win7 again another time because I still have a stupid belief that I can run MM…
Right, so, what next? Let’s give Win10 a go! (punch punch punch punch)
https://superuser.com/questions/1613335/shared-folders-not-showing-in-virtualbox-windows-10-guest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AwzaZmRNsI
