So it looks like my amazing blog got itself off to a bad start. I’ve lost weeks and weeks of blogging time to… wait for it… a stick of bad RAM. It had been in my machine for about a year, and I never even suspected it. So, at the moment, my netbook’s running Windows XP. And I REALLY want it to run Ubuntu. However, after weeks of coaxing it this far I don’t know if I even want to try reformatting it again.
But then again, playing retro games on a linux netbook was the niche I wanted to write about. So we’ll see. Also I still really want to use Ubuntu! So we shall see, I just wanted to leave an update so I didn’t slip off into the nether. =)
So, over the last few days my poor little netbook, my Samsung NC10, has had its operating system reinstalled about 5 or 6 times. Essentially it boils down to my obsession with World of Warcraft.
Back when I bought it, the plan was I would have something portable that could just about run WoW when I was down south visiting my parents, on holiday, whatever. Having installed Lucid Lynx (Ubuntu 10.4), I decided to install WoW. Plenty of places online said Ubuntu had no issues, no problem. Only I could only run it in DirectX, and OpenGL (I gather) would give me more than 1/3FPS. A third there folks.
Yeah. I know.
I tried for a while to get it running, but to no avail. I figured, why not just have a Windows partition for WoW and have my main partition running Ubuntu. Then I realised, when I installed Ubuntu, I must have overwritten the recovery partition. Hooray! Luckily my netbook came with a recovery CD (despite not having a CD rom drive. Weird, I know), so using a combination of nLite and WinSetupFromUSB I managed to install XP without forking out for an external CDRom drive.
So WoW’s installing now. Not all that retro for the RetroBox, but vital for my day-to-day existance 
Planning to install my Ubuntu partition maybe tomorrow (once I’ve verified my Windows one works like I want it to) – then we should be getting to some retro/linux gaming!
In this how-to we’re going to take a look at something pretty basic. To play most of the games I’m going to get going in Ubuntu, we’re going to need to install both DOSBox and ScummVM. The basic steps are exactly the same, so I’m going to wrap them up together in a single how-to.
It’s worth noting that I’m running Ubuntu 10.4. I can’t really trouble-shoot any other flavour of Linux since this is a learning process for me as well. Google is your friend, same as it’s been mine
So, to start with, we should open “System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager”. That brings us to a repository of programs that contains both DOSBox and ScummVM.
In the quick search box (at the top right of the window) search for ScummVM and DOSBox. Click on check-box next to the entry you want, in our case it’s fairly obvious, and select “Mark for Installation”. Then hit the large green tick labelled “Apply”. There’ll be a few bars that fill up as your content is downloaded and installed. And that’s it! You should now be able to head to “Applications>Games” and see entries for both DOSBox and ScummVM. Bear in mind that these might not be the most updated versions of the software, those would come directly from their respective websites. However I’ve found they work for me quite well at the moment.
One final thing, now that you have the installations in there it’s worth defining somewhere to keep your games and that’s easy to copy things across to. I went into the Home folder and made a DOS and ScummVM folder to move things into so I could find them easily. It’s also worth having a folder like this for DOSBox specifically, so you can mount it as the C drive.
((I’ll be back to edit this post with DOSBox config stuff, like how to auto-mount the C drive.))
So, as a debut to the website, I thought I would link a video a friend sent me earlier today. It raises one or two interesting ideas which, being someone who’s interested in how virtual worlds can affect real ones, I find intriguing.
Granted, I won’t be lining up to play the “OH NOES! WHY’S THE OIL GONE?!” game, I do see where she’s coming from. And one or two of the sources she quotes are quite interesting. Have a watch (if you didn’t before continuing the post). Interesting stuff.