Server - 2 VMs, running old game ?

Eledris · August 26, 2016

Hello Folks,

I am pondering with this idea for quite some time now and finally decided to give it a shot, hoping to get some first directions here.

There is an old round-based strategy game (Heroes of Might and Magic IV, specifically, that I would like to play on a virtual machine.)

Why VM? Because the turns tend to take quite some time (from few minutes to 10-20 minutes per turn/player) and if you do it in a regular multiplayer match it means for the other Player to wait a good amount of time before its his turn again and also makes a session take easily 1-2 days straight. Sure, one could save after 2-3 hours playing together and resume the other day but even the 2-3 hours play is a pain in the butt if you spent half of your time waiting. Waiting time is good to think about own strategy but for the majority of the time it just is annoying, basically because you are forced to be on your Screen at the same time.

If you could potentially have the game running 24/7 and the game-session open, you could check by at any time, do your turn and then forget about it again. Simply drop your mate a message and he knows when he got spare time he may do his turn and so on. Such game will easily take up to a year on this speed but also makes it much more interesting in my mind as you will think about your strategy, next turn, etc. more wisely and forced to take your time. Sure enough, I don't want to have my personal rig running 24/7 and just sitting there, so a virtualisation solution on a lower wattage System would be ideal.

System requirements for the game are:

300MHz Pentium II processor - 450MHz P3 recommended
128Mb RAM - 256Mb RAM recommended
16Mb video card

Enough about the idea.. here are my questions:

1) What would be the hardware requirements to have these 2 VMs running? Is the below sufficient?

I am currently looking into paying 20EUR for an ASUS-K8N-DRE/RS161 System with 2 Opteron 2.4GHZ and 8Gig RAM DRAM. Comes in a Server case and /w power supply and peripherals.
Not much I can do wrong on this Price, right ?

2) How about graphic card(s)? I read multiple times that if you create VM's you Need to assign a specific GPU to each? Also, referring to above Mainboard, I understand it has an onboard GPU and is there a way I can add an Extension Card GPU ? Will this do the deal ?

3) I found some guides to set up a Linux distro and potentially create VMs and will work trough these before I dive into questions on this topic that have already their answer in the Forum.

4) General Software config questions: Is is possible to run the game on 2 VMS on the same machine and find a network-ish way to both VMs for the game to start a TC/IP session? For this game specially I found local Networks easier to set up as via INTERNET. Can I simply install teamviewer or similar on both VMs and have the Players connect via this Interface ?

Thanks for your help,

Eledris