Mahjonng Solitaire 2.20

[lmotaku]

Is there a way to make Mahjonng Solitaire 2.20 render/play smoother over Virtualbox? I'm using 3D hardware acceleration(But I doubt that actually effects anything on the eCS 2 end).
I also am allowing 128MB out of my 2GB graphics card to be utilized. Doesn't seem to change rendering smoothness.

[Doug Bissett]

Is there a way to make Mahjonng Solitaire 2.20 render/play smoother over Virtualbox? I'm using 3D hardware acceleration(But I doubt that actually effects anything on the eCS 2 end).
I also am allowing 128MB out of my 2GB graphics card to be utilized. Doesn't seem to change rendering smoothness.

3D probably just gets ignored, but it may actually slow it down. I think that OS/2 only uses 32 meg of video memory, no matter how much you assign. If you install the VBox extensions, it might work a little better. You should also adjust the Mahjonng settings. I usually turn off animation, which makes it much better, even on real hardware. Also, be sure that you assign enough memory so that the program doesn't end up swapping. That will really cause performance problems. I find that 512 meg is about the minimum that you want to use, and 800 meg is almost always good.

[lmotaku]

I set 2GB ram for this guest OS. I also looked around in the settings, I pushed animation speed up to full, it seems to be a tad better, will try disabling it. This PC is AMD Phenom II 550BE, 4GB 1333Mhz DDR3 ram, Ati Radeon HD 6570 2GB, so I have some memory and power to go around, provided it actually wants to use it. lol Update: It does seem to run better without animations.

I've got a lot of AMD equipment, this try-out of OS/2 will help me determine if I want to put this on an AMD Athlon XP 1.4Ghz, 756MB ram, Ati Rage 128Pro(8xAGP).

[Doug Bissett]

I set 2GB ram for this guest OS. I also looked around in the settings, I pushed animation speed up to full, it seems to be a tad better, will try disabling it. This PC is AMD Phenom II 550BE, 4GB 1333Mhz DDR3 ram, Ati Radeon HD 6570 2GB, so I have some memory and power to go around, provided it actually wants to use it. lol Update: It does seem to run better without animations.

I've got a lot of AMD equipment, this try-out of OS/2 will help me determine if I want to put this on an AMD Athlon XP 1.4Ghz, 756MB ram, Ati Rage 128Pro(8xAGP).

Actually, 1 GB of RAM is probably more than you will ever use with eCS in in VBox., but 2 GB is not a problem.

That AMD machine should work well with eCS I have a similar machine, with 448 meg, an 800 mhz Athlon, and an ATI Rage Pro video. Use SNAP with that video card, and it should run in accelerated mode. In my case, 448 meg is really not quite enough for great performance. 756 meg should be pretty good, even with animations (which, along with sound, I find to be annoying). BTW, if you haven't noticed, Mahjonng, and Klondike solitaire, might take over the sound card, blocking other sounds. It depends on exactly what sound card is emulated, and which sound driver you use.

[conradc1234]

I would suggest turning off the sound in the actual game itself......am not in front of an OS/2 machine at present but am almost certain the option exists.
I remember doing it for OS/2 Solitaire (in a virtual machine) and the game was a lot more playable because it didn't have to wait for a sound to be played before it turned over every card. Hope this helps.
Conrad.

[Doug Bissett]

I would suggest turning off the sound in the actual game itself......am not in front of an OS/2 machine at present but am almost certain the option exists.
I remember doing it for OS/2 Solitaire (in a virtual machine) and the game was a lot more playable because it didn't have to wait for a sound to be played before it turned over every card. Hope this helps.
Conrad.

Actually, in both Mahjonng, and Klondike Solitaire, turning off the sound doesn't really turn off the sound. The game will still complain if sound support is not there (REM the driver,  reboot, and see what happens), and it will hog the sound card services, unless you have one of the very few drivers that will actually share the device (try loading one of the games while you are playing music). I think the sounds are used to time the game, and all they do is put the frequency high enough that people can't hear it (watch your pets, but it takes really good speakers to get that high of a frequency to actually play).

[conradc1234]

OK Now I'll have to set up a virtual machine just to check out what I was talking about! LOL!
Conrad.

[conradc1234]

Just thinking....is VirtualBox better than MS's virtual machines or is it vice vearsa? And for that matter, has anyone run a virtual Os/2 machine on a Mac(or even a Hackintosh)?
Thanks again,
Conrad.

[Dave Yeo]

IIRC with virtual box it can depend on the version, some work very well, others not so much.  MS's virtual machine used to work quite well.
I've seen people running OS/2 under both virtual box and parallels on OSX

[conradc1234]

Thanks Dave - I'll try a few installations over the next week or so and see what comes up trumps!
Conrad.

[conradc1234]

OK I did a quick install of Warp 4 under VirtualBox on a machine running Kubuntu. Initially I did it without support for sound, then I added sound...both ran smoothly. With Mahjongg there was a slight delay with the animations with the sound turned on, this seemed to lessen when I turned it off under the game options menu. With Solitaire it was even more noticeable but it seems that the animations are delayed until the sound has finished playing as if the sounds get priority over all else.
I installed using Gengradd as supplied on the OS/2 installation CD (didn't test under the one supplied with VirtualBox) and was quite pleased with the speed of the graphics generally - until I tried to run Win-OS2 and the screen went haywire but I am sure a FixPak plus a SciTech driver would sort this out....
Don't know if any of this is of help to the original query posted though ;-)
Conrad.