(If you're not running Linux and/or have no interest in doing so, you can skip this one. Otherwise, read on.)

I spent some time playing with emulation software this weekend, with mixed results.

In the past I have experimented with WINE, with very little success. I have been curious about commercial products such as Vmware and Win4Lin, but could not justify their purchase for something that may well not work. Besides, I'm a big proponent of FOSS (Free Open Source Software), and would like to find an open source alternative.

Enter QEMU, an emulator that fits the above description. Like Vmware and Win4Lin, this actually emulates the PC itself, rather than the operating system. A copy of Windows is needed, which is then installed on this "virtual PC" in more or less the usual manner, and then the applications are installed on the guest OS.

Getting QEMU was as easy as typing "apt-get install qemu" on my Mepis Linux box that I use for experiments like this (Althon XP2200, 512 MB RAM). Like many open source projects, documentation is a bit sketchy, and generally aimed at someone higher on the geek scale than me.

Still, after a little Googling, I was able to create a "virtual hard drive" (juat a file, actually), and get my Windows 2000 CD to boot and install.

Emulated systems take a perfomance hit, and this became immediately apparent, with the install taking over 2 hours, not including the time I spent solving a couple of bugs along the way. Fortunately, the install does not require a lot of attention, so I was able to spend the time doing other things, occasionally checking on it when I happened to walk by.

Soon, I was looking at the familiar Windows 2K desktop, running on Linux system, Excited now, I loaded the Casino Verite CD and started the installation. It installed normally, as did CVCX.

Unfortunately, my success ended here. Neither application would boot, with both giving me one of the usual Windows cryptic error messages. Something about a floating point exception with CV, and a disconnect with CVCX.

So the experiment was a failure, right? Not quite. I installed BJRM2000, and it worked perfectly. Cool.

On a hunch, I dug up my Casino Verite version 2.1 CD, and ran the install. Success! It runs perfectly.

Version 2.1 does not have all the bells and whistles of the current version (no Cassie - sigh), but it still has the excellent graphics and is far superior to anything else on the market.

So, I now have the 16-bit version of CV and BJRM running on Linux. The applications boot up noticeably slower than on similar hardware running Windows natively, but they run at acceptable speeds. OTOH, Windows itself boots up much faster, in less than a minute.

I intend to experiment more, when I have the time, as I still have not given up on getting the current version of CV. as well as CVCX to run. But first, I want to try this on my aging Toshiba laptop (P3 650 Mhz, 320 MB RAM).

Call it a work in progress. :-)

If anyone is interested in trying this, let me know. As I said, I encountered a few bugs along the way, and can probably save you some head-scratching and Googling.