Hacking at 0300

I wanted to run some of my old games (notably Riven) on my shiny new Windows 8.1 machine, but it wouldn't even try to install on a 64-bit operating system. Luckily, Oracle offers VirtualBox to run virtual machines, and Microsoft offers a Windows XP virtual hard drive (.vhd file) through its Windows XP mode for Windows 7. Note that it won't run directly on Windows 8, but you can extract the .vhd file as outlined by lifehacker:

Then use 7-Zip open the EXE file as an archive.

Within that archive, find the sources/xpm file within it, and extract that folder to your hard drive.

Finally, in the extracted xpm file, you'll find a file called VirtualXPVHD. Export it and rename it to VirtualXPVHD.vhd

In VirtualBox, create a new virtual machine running Windows XP, and instead of creating a new virtual hard drive, use the one created above.

This will give you a new virtual machine that will require you register within 30 days, which you can't do (since Windows XP isn't supported anymore). We'll fix that later.

Start up the virtual machine, deal with the craziness of mouse capturing (toggle the right control key to get the mouse back) until you install "Guest Additions":

In the "Devices" menu in the virtual machine's menu bar, select "Insert Guest Additions CD image" then run that installer in the virtual machine. Now the mouse should integrate smoothly.

In the VirtualBox Manager, in the Network tab, unclick "Cable Connected". You don't want this virus-friendly operating system talking to the internet!

To activate Windows XP, you can try the file named KEY in the exe file with the virtual hard drive, but the comments on lifehacker indicate it won't work. I got a new bios from vmlite, and install it as:

path\to\VirtualBoxFolder\VBoxManage.exe setextradata your-vm-name "VBoxInternal/Devices/pcbios/0/Config/BiosRom" "path\to\pcbios.bin"

And it all seems to work. I don't feel guilty about using a pirated operating system license, since I am running Windows 8 legally, and Microsoft won't sell me XP.

Installing CD's is a pain, and Riven wants to keep swapping them, but making them virtual images makes it much easier. Install ISORecorder (the Windows 7 version works with Windows 8) and now the contextual menu (right-click) for CD's includes a "Create Image from CD" option. Save with the iso extension, and VirtualBox will mount them just fine.

Unfortunately, I now do not have any time to play anything.

Now that I have my computer working, I want to get back at my github repositories. I could type my password with every push, but it's easier to use SSH with a key pair. Since I'm using Putty for shell access, I use Puttygen that comes with it. The problem is that Puttygen's format is not the right one for git. There are recommendations online to set $GIT_SSH to use plink with Pageant, which does use Puttygen's format, but I read that github won't support that, so I ended up doing the following:

Create a key pair with Puttygen. In the conversion menu, create a file in openSSH format. Create the file ~/.ssh/config:

Host github.com
	User git
	IdentityFile /path/to/openssh-format-privatekey

At github.com add the public key that you created. Back in Powershell, in the directory with the local repository, do

git remote set-url origin git@github.com:username/repo-name.git

to use SSH. Now git push origin master will push the local master branch back up to github without needed a password (if you created the private key with a passphrase, you will have to enter that.

In putty, for each host, set Host Name in the Session tab and select the private key (in Puttygen format!) in the Connection->SSH->Auth tab.