rebudgeting

I've reactivated my old Creatures Caves account, and, in an amazing twist of fate (from a delusional-paranoid point of view), no part of my body is on fire or otherwise in peril. Cheers to the mod who helped me with my name mixup.

Anyway, today after an attempt to get settled in with my breed packs, I started getting some really fun engine errors:

Creature:
Family: 4 Moniker: 001-vale-qerf7-qslyq-6mvc8-jdya6 Gender: 2 Variant: 5
MemoryMappedFile::Open

Please make sure the following file exists:
.\Creature Galleries\001-vale-qerf7-qslyq-6mvc8-jdya60.creaturegallery
It may also need to be writable

Windows NT/2000 5.1 build 2600 (Service Pack 3)
OriginalDisplay DirectX (netbabel 148)

... and so on, and so on. Aborted birth photo attempts, in other words.

Does anyone else remember the fun early days of C3/DS, when Windows XP was new, and NTFS was still iffy? DS especially liked to throw meaningless 'hey, you don't have enough hard drive space to safely launch!' errors with dozens of gigabytes still free on a drive too large for it to comprehend.

Well. It wasn't one of those. My install is on a new partition now. I'm being dreadful miserly with hard drive space (a mere 1GB), but this VM also houses some other software I need day-to-day, so I can't afford it crowding up my 128GB SSD too much.

... still looking for OneNote 2003. If I can get any of the Office 2007 overhead off my back, that'll free up a lot of space. (Don't talk to me about mac OneNote.)

Anyway, I also got two-way sharing going. For the similarly OS-blocked: It's done completely independent of Virtualbox' guest additions (that's only helpful for guest-to-host file sharing)-- you have to actually set the network connection to be bridged instead of NAT, then turn on file sharing, so the XP VM shows up as another box on the network. (As well as add the VM's MAC to any router whitelists that may exist. Not sure if it would interfere with host-to-guest talk, but it'll definitely keep it offline.)

That all means I can use vim, caos.vim, and, if it ever comes up, potentially some sprite handling software that isn't Spritebuilder. (I have a really bad history with Spritebuilder-- I've never been able to get it to import images right.) Slightly more tolerable times. Until I have to reboot, anyway -- not that that happens often. (That's the part I've never liked about VMs.)