Unreal VMWare

Even though I don’t consider myself a “gamer”, I do like the occasional console or PC game now and then. I really enjoy first person shooters for the simple fact that I can jump into an online game, or gather some friends together and just frag the heck outta some people. I don’t have the patience for long adventure games or those that require learning some new move, skill, or spell at every turn. I just want to turn on the game, have some fun, and turn it off when I start to suck get bored.

For that reason, I keep going back to the old classic Unreal Tournament. If I could have gotten credit for the amount of hours I played that game and the original Halo in college, I could have gotten degrees in each. While Halo has gotten better and better with age, Unreal (in my opinion) hasn’t. I still enjoy playing the 1999 Game of the Year edition of Unreal Tournament more than any of it’s descendants.

At some point last week I decided I wanted to play Unreal during my lunch break here at work. Even though I’m on an Intel iMac, I knew there was a Mac port that worked on my G5 iMac at home. Unfortunately “Unreal Tournament X” (as it’s called) isn’t native to and doesn’t work with the Intel Macs, so my only other option was to run it on Windows via VMWare Fusion. I didn’t have high expectations when I brought in my Unreal Disc from home today, but to my surprise it worked right off the bat. The only problem was the mouse. It worked fine in the preferences window, but was so finicky during gameplay that I couldn’t get my eyes off the floor – literally. As you can imagine, this wouldn’t do.

Fortunately, Google revealed that French blogger Arnaud Boudou had the answer:

As written above, I got issues with mouse. in fact, the issue comes from “VMware Toolbox” and VMware’s mouse driver. this tool, with mouse driver, allow you to have a transparent mouse use between VMware and MacOS X. If you uninstall VMware Toolbox and mouse driver, you won’t encounter mouse issues with games anymore.

Sure enough, if you go into the Control Panel on your VMWare-booted install of Windows, you’ll see that the mouse driver is in fact a VMWare branded driver. To change this, simply open up the Mouse properties from the Control Panel, click the Hardware tab, select the driver, click the properties button, in the Properties window select the Driver tab and click the Update Driver button. In the wizard, manually select the PS/2 Compatible mouse driver and you should be good to go. The only downside that I’ve found is the mouse is a little slower (even with sensitivity turned all the way up) than I prefer.

For some reason, the game will not run full-screen, even within the VMWare window, but it’s still very playable. As you can see, I even jumped into a quick internet game. Disregard the -4 spread, I was trying to take screenshots. 😉 Anyway, it’s good to have UT back again and I’m looking forward to dusting off my Flak Cannon, Pulse Gun, and Rocket Launcher during future lunch breaks. Happy Fragging!