The other night, a few of my friends and I decided to get together and play a game of Starcraft. We got everything installed, but I quickly discovered that SC looks horrible when shown full screen (at 640×480) on a 22″ widescreen monitor.
To solve the problem, I fired up a Windows XP VM I had running on VirtualBox. After enabling 3D Acceleration, the game ran fine, and looked great in the windowed VM. We all connected to a game on Battle.net, and then things went downhill. My soon-to-be-brother-in-law Dave was playing as well, and shares my internet connection. Starcraft, apparently, doesn’t like multiple people connected to the same game from behind a single router. Much lag ensued.
To solve the problem, one of us would have to bypass the router. As my system is right beside the cable modem and primary router (and Dave connects through a Client-Bridge router), I was the obvious choice.
After digging around and finding a second NIC, I plugged it in to my system and fired it up. Also in prep, I connected a 10/100 5 port switch to my cable modem and plugged the router in to the switch. Once Windows finished booting, I configured everything as follows (these steps are for Windows XP, however this is possible in Vista and Windows 7 as well):
- Installed the NIC Driver
- Opened the ‘Network Connections’ Control Panel and opened the Properties dialog for the new adapter
- Unchecked the ‘Internet Protocol TCP/IP’ option — this prevents the host operating system from obtaining an IP address on this adapter, which is a must for security, and because my ISP only allows me to use two External IP Addresses.
- Opened Sun VirtualBox, selected my VM and chose ‘Settings’
- In the ‘Network’ section, set the adapater to use the Bridged network, and changed the adapter to the new one.
- Connected the new network card to the switch.
- Booted the VM
Now the XP VM has an External IP Address, and the host operating system doesn’t.
Once done, Starcraft played beautifully!
