Wolfheinrich's World

Last time I talked about how I have discovered Virtual Box (an open source project) that can give a better emulation platform than the standard Windows 7 XP mode, but the down side to the standard Virtual Box solution is that you still need to have a separate XP license in order to go that route.  I have been thinking if we can somehow utilize the free Windows XP license that comes with Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate, that would be the best solution.  I thought about converting the virtual hard drive from the XP mode (.vhd) to something readable by Virtual Box (.vdi), but I soon found out there would be issues with validation since the two emulators are just too different  and would flag the Windows Genuine Advantage even if the OS was already installed and validated.  However, I discovered something else during my search that branched off from the Virtual Box development (benefit of an open source project that is) that is aiming to take advantage of the XP mode free license – VMLite.

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I talked about writing an update post the other day, finally got around to do it now.  To tell the truth, ever since I migrated to Windows 7, I have been on a scramble to get all the eroge games I love running; the fact that I have a huge pile of them sitting didn’t help at all!  So on the top of the agenda this month was to tackle some of the games that I absolutely need to finish, such as Madou Souhei Kleinhasa and Fortune Arterial. One of my greatest fear before migrating to Windows 7 64bit edition was compatibility issues with all the legacy eroge games and all the support applications I use to play them.  Luckily there were very few problems so far.  Most the eroge games I want to keep running have been able to run so far; however, there were a few exceptions, most notably the new regional protection scheme being deployed by one of my favorite eroge game companies Triangle, their fierce regional protection scheme have left me in fear for quite some time.

In my last post on this topic, I talked about how I bypassed this regional protection scheme, by using the free Windows XP mode Japanese language edition, however that method is by no means perfect, most notably the color support is only up to 16bit and sound support also left a lot to be desired (a certain Austrian Otaku has pointed me in the right direction, which I will talk about in a little bit).  After more thorough searches, I finally managed to locate a proper regional patch on a Chinese forum that will enable Madou Souhei Kleinhasa to run on a non-native Japanese OS (for whatever reason, it was never leaked back to the English forum such as Hongfire, no idea why it hasn’t happened yet).

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So today, I would like to set a little time aside to talk about regional protection of eroge game in general.  Before Windows XP came along, the only way to “properly” run Japanese eroge games was to purchase a separate copy of Windows 95 or Windows 98 and install them into a separate partition in the main hard disk using an off the shelf MBR overlay software such as System Commander… that was how I used to run Windows based eroge game back in the early 90s.  Windows XP changed all that, with the ability to install East Asian language pack and applocale basically took care of all the language compatibility issue for the past decade or so… However, the situation is starting to change again … quite possibly after a public outrage of having an eroge game called “Rapelay” released by Illusion being offered for sale in Amazon UK in early 2009, a string of Eroge game publishing companies have begun tightening the sale of their software outside of Japan, some companies have decided to ban all ip addresses except for those in Japan, some companies have implemented tough regional protection scheme, company such as Triangle.

I have have always been a fan of Triangle Soft’s game, their long line of Mahou Senshin games

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