Ever since I moved away from Windows to Ubuntu, I’ve missed being able to play one of my favourite games: Freelancer. Freelancer is a 2003 space simulator game by Microsoft/Digital Anvil which is similar to the games Elite and Wing Commander: Privateer.
Well, I just discovered that it runs beautifully in VMware with 3D acceleration enabled!
I unpacked a Windows XP VM, installed VMware Tools, installed Freelancer, added the mks.enable3d = TRUE directive to the .vmx file, and it worked, running on top of my Ubuntu-based host! Performance was surprisingly good (though it could have been better), and was definitely playable.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get any Quake3-based games going (in particular Urban Terror and my own standalone TrueCombat 0.45), but that doesn’t really matter, because they run fine in Wine anyway (or even natively).
Update: I just got banned from the GetOnIt server for “speed modding”, which is likely due to the fact that the game runs a little too fast in VMware — a timing issue.
Update 2: I got unbanned not long after, after I explained what happened.
[...] is quite ironic that VirtualBox only supports OpenGL acceleration. VMware has had 3D acceleration for a while now, but they have only supported Direct3D, not OpenGL. So I suppose in the meantime, you can use [...]
Just play “Nexus – The Jupiter Incident”. Should run under OpelGL and it DOES run under Wine in high FPS.