The importance of playing games - a lot...

A while ago now, the Virtual Server development team delivered the first internal build of Virtual Server SP1 for x64 systems for our test team to start working on. Needless to say I grabbed this build and started trying every obscure virtual machine I could think of.

This initial build was surprisingly solid and the vast majority of operating systems just ran without a problem (kudos to PeterJ for his hard work there). However - late one night after working all night I decided to kick back and play some games. I was booted into my x64 version of Windows so I just started up Virtual Server and decided to play a game of Civilization.

The game was playing fine - but something was bugging me. I eventually started up a 32-bit copy of Windows and started Civilization inside of a virtual machine on it so I could compare the two. Sure enough - the x64 version of Virtual Server was failing to draw the blue selection highlight on the menus in Civilization.

After some investigation by the development team - it turned out that this was caused by an obscure bug that was introduced during the port of one of our drivers to the x64 platform. So there you have the reason why it is important to play games a *lot* - as if I were a casual gamer I would never have noticed the missing blue highlight.

Cheers,
Ben