It’s a really stupid question, but since I’ve struggled for weeks now to get a game working (You Are EMPTY, really janky engine), thought to ask if I can use my crappy APU in A8-5600K (i seriously need an upgrade) to run a Win 7 VM, JUST so I can run this game past the cutscenes w/o it black screening.
It’d be easiest to simply install Windows on a new SSD just so you can play those sections. I think there is also a way to make a Windows 7 Live USB - no need to even install it.
You could also try launching it through proton in Steam, it’s wine with a few extra bits. Also IIRC Lutris (A Linux game launcher) may have something that can help?
Another option is to find a game using the same engine on winedb, and see if there are any tweaks that can be ported across. Winetricks provides a bunch of tweaking options.
Edit: Sorry I misread, I thought you were passing through real hardware within the VM.
UEFI Passthrough with Windows 7 is tricky, because it will most likely hang during the bootscreen / animated logo. This might be fixable with using a patched tianocore UEFI for the VM, but I newer could get this to work.
Passthrough with Seabios never worked for me either. You are only going to add to many unknowns with that - is the host compatible, is the GPU compatible, do you need to preload the the video ROM of the GPU, do you need to bind vfio or not?
If you already got vfio passthrough working, you could try Windows 8 or 8.1.
What worked for me was Windows 8.1 - it doesn’t have most of the recent changes which break older games, can load Windows 7 drivers and is fully UEFI compliant.
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I tried, quite literally, EVERYTHING I COULD, to get it running.
Nothing. The engine is so scuffed it just says fuck off. Even on windows 10 it refused! 7 was broken but it, more less “ran”.
This game has me intrigued, I’ll try to hunt down a copy and try to get it running on modern HW.