Saturday, August 24, 2013

To the Dark Side.

I've been eschewing Microsoft for a long time now. I'm in and in a UNIX guy, and despise the horrible practices of Microsoft, in what they do to standards. Also I have been totally unimpressed by the quality of their Operating Systems. So why did I buy a copy of Windows 7 today? Well, PC gaming is alive and kicking, so I want to see if I can get my hit game The Little Crane That Could to the Windows platform. Here are my trials and tribulations of installing Windows7 on a 2007 Mac Mini.

When installing 64 bit Windows on a Mac Mini, you get greeted by a cryptic message. "Select CD-ROM boot type". Whatever option you choose, 1 or 2, nothing happens. The machine is just frozen. It turns out you need to burn a new copy of your Windows installation DVD with some special options. More info on fluxbox.co.uk.

Using iPads and OSX a lot, I can now only use a mouse with "Natural Scrolling." Getting natural scrolling to work involves touching the murkiest and most vile part of the Windows Operating System: the Registry. For expert users only.

After installation, audio is not working. The driver CD that Boot Camp created does not seem to be any help with it. I still have to find a solution for this.

First order of business was to get some development going. After downloading Visual Studio Express, git, cmake and make, I was able to build GLFW3 from sources in the git repo.

UPDATE I had to reinstall windows after buying a new computer. Here are some issues to consider:

  • When building gl3w, you first need to install python2.7
  • When building glfw, you first need to install cmake.
  • To build glfw, make sure you run vcallvars.bat from the Visual Studio program. Then you can run 'cmake .' followed by 'nmake'
  • IE is super slow, and so is chrome. I fixed the slow chrome by unselecting all proxy options in the network settings.

1 comment:

  1. Maybe with a virtual machine, it's easier.
    i've been recently surprised how easy it was to install Win8 with VM Fusion on Mac. And the 3D performance is decent (a Unity3d demo ran fine). That as my complaint with VirtualBox.
    Maybe it's a bit too much for an older Mac Mini.

    Luc

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