Thom Lawrence

Entries tagged as ‘xna’

XNA Studio 3.0 under Parallels

September 28, 2008 · No Comments

Still no joy with the new beta. Any VMWare Fusion peeps have any luck?

Categories: Gaming · Programming
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Worst Update Ever

July 2, 2007 · No Comments

So Parallels 3.0 has continued to frustrate me. I can forgive the XNA thing - seems just as likely to be Microsoft’s fault. I filed a bug (or is it ‘participated’ in a ‘connection’?) on the atrocious Connect site, which you can vote up if you like… a few people have come here from Google with seemingly the same problem.

It’s not even that ActiveSync still doesn’t work, removing the only other reason I really had to buy the upgrade. It’s three things, really:

  1. My virtual machines occasionally take about a minute to resume.
  2. Tonight, Parallels decided to start corrupting my Windows XP disk image, leaving me with recursive bluescreen fun.
  3. I can’t even repair it, because I can’t work out how to make my install disc image bootable.

So it’s been disappointing. Probably nobody’s fault, but I really feel like going back to 2.5. Or trying VMWare and not having my fans on the whole time even if the VM’s idle etc etc. Grr.

Categories: Computing
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Parallels 3.0 & XNA Studio

June 14, 2007 · No Comments

I enthusiastically upgraded to Parallels 3.0, hoping to enjoy its DirectX support. XNA Studio is one of the reasons this interests me - with my MacBook I’m not expecting to write or indeed play many 3D games, but you can’t run XNA projects without acceleration. However:

System.ArgumentException was unhandled
  Message="The device name is not valid. Device names are in the form \\\\.\\\\DEVICE1\r\nParameter name: screenDeviceName"
  Source="Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game"
  ParamName="screenDeviceName"
  StackTrace:
       at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.WindowsGameWindow.ScreenFromDeviceName(String screenDeviceName)
       at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.WindowsGameForm.ResizeWindow(String screenDeviceName, Int32 clientWidth, Int32 clientHeight, Boolean center)
       at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.WindowsGameForm.EndScreenDeviceChange(String screenDeviceName, Int32 clientWidth, Int32 clientHeight)
       at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.WindowsGameWindow.EndScreenDeviceChange(String screenDeviceName, Int32 clientWidth, Int32 clientHeight)
       at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GraphicsDeviceManager.ChangeDevice(Boolean forceCreate)
       at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GraphicsDeviceManager.Microsoft.Xna.Framework.IGraphicsDeviceManager.CreateDevice()
       at Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game.Run()
       at Spacewar.Program.Main(String[] args) in C:\Documents and Settings\Thom\My Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects\Spacewar\Spacewar\Program.cs:line 16

Google doesn’t seem to know a lot about this exception, but I’m hoping someone can help. I’m downloading the refresh of XNA studio from earlier this month, so that might fix everything. I’ve already wasted half an hour finding out that you have to actually edit your VM to enable DirectX support - it doesn’t appear by magic.

The other thing that I couldn’t get to work in previous versions of Parallels is ActiveSync, so hopefully I’ll have more luck there. I’m not even on a trial - I am amazed at how reckless buying a Mac makes you with software purchases…

Categories: Computing
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