MapleStory

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Contents

Introduction

MapleStory is a free-of-charge, 2D, side-scrolling massively multiplayer online role-playing game developed by the South Korean company Wizet. Several versions of the game are available for specific countries or regions, and each is published by various companies such as Wizet and Nexon. Although playing the game is free, character appearances and gameplay enhancements can be purchased from the "Cash Shop" using real money. MapleStory has a combined total of over 50 million subscriber accounts in all of its versions. MapleStory North America (Global), for players mainly in North America and outside of East Asia, Southeast Asia and Europe, has over three million players.

In the game, players travel the "Maple World", defeating monsters and developing their characters' skills and abilities as is typical in role-playing games. Players can interact with others in many ways, such as through chatting, trading, and playing minigames. Groups of players can band together in parties to hunt monsters and share the rewards. Players can also join a guild to interact more easily with each other.

Why?

I am an avid mapler myself, however, I am also an avid archer! For some time, I have wanted to get MapleStory working on Arch Linux in some way, but nothing seemed to work. As you might have guessed by now, recently, while playing around with VirtualBox, I discovered a method to get MapleStory working on it! Though in this method you won't actually have MapleStory running on Arch Linux, you'll have it running on a VirtualBox Windows virtual machine, that is still pretty good compared to the results that other people have gotten when trying to get MapleStory to work on Linux, or any other non-Windows operating system, for that matter!

I hope there are at least a few other maplers using Arch Linux, or any other GNU/Linux, and if there aren't, I hope that someone will port this article over to other Linux, or even MapleStory, forums/wikis. Anyways, let's begin.

Setup VirtualBox

  • Download and install a version of Virtual Box that is version 3.0+. The reason for this is that only versions 3.0 and over support an experimental DirectX Driver with 3D acceleration that is required for MapleStory to run. VirtualBox (OSE) is available from the community repository.
pacman -S virtualbox-ose
  • Then, to make the necessary VirtualBox driver start on startup, add vboxdrv to the DAEMONS= array of your /etc/rc.conf.
vi /etc/rc.conf
  • If you do not want to have the VirtualBox driver start on startup, you can always just start it manually each time you want to use a virtual machine in VirtualBox.
modprobe vboxdrv
  • Add yourself to the group "vboxusers", so you can use VirtualBox.
gpasswd -a USERNAME vboxusers
  • Restart, your computer.
reboot
  • Run VirtualBox.
virtualbox & exit

Setup Windows, DirectX, and MapleStory

  • Create a Windows Virtual Machine, add a hard disk to it, and install and update Windows on it(preferably Windows XP, as MapleStory runs better on it).
  • Once you have done all you wanted to on that Windows installation, restart it, boot it into safe mode by holding F8 at the boot and selecting "Safe Mode", and wait until the desktop is fully loaded.
  • After you are at the desktop, go to "Devices" at the top of the menu of the Windows virtual machine, and select "Install Guest Additions...". Wait until Guest Additions finishes installing, and when VirtualBox asks you if you want to mount a virtual disk containing the Guest Additions on the virtual machine, say "Yes".
  • Run the main executable on the disk that doesn't have amd64 or x86 following its name. Follow the instructions it gives you, and when it asks you what components to install, make sure both of the boxes it shows you are checked.
  • After the install is completed, the virtual machine will restart automatically. After it restarts, shut it down.
  • Congratulations! You now have DirectX installed on your VirtualBox virtual machine! Now you need to activate "3D Acceleration" in VirtualBox, which will enable DirectX.
  • In the VirtualBox main window, make sure you have your machine with Windows selected. Then, click on "Machine", and then "Settings...", at the top. A new window should pop up. On the left hand side, click on the display panel, and in the new settings section, tick Enable 3D Acceleration. Click "OK", to save the settings.
  • Start your Windows virtual machine, install MapleStory just as you would on a normal windows computer, and run MapleStory.

Notes

The method posted in this guide was tested and successfully worked with Global MapleStory Ver. 0.74.

Please take note that this way of running MapleStory is slower than by running it normally, on a normal windows computer. Also, try to not interact with your Linux desktop while playing MapleStory, because this can cause HackShield to shut down MapleStory, due to the fact that it believes there is a hacking attempt.

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