Making Roblox Work on Ubuntu in Windows 7 on Virtual Box

EDIT: January 10, 2021 – for the most recent updates on this topic, see this post

IMPORTANT! THIS BLOG POST IS BEING TESTED NOW AND NEEDS SOME WORK. I EXPECT TO UPDATE / IMPROVE THIS AT LEAST ONE MORE TIME. IT’S HERE JUST FOR TESTING PURPOSES. NOTE ALSO THAT AS OF TODAY, EVEN IF YOU GET THIS ALL DONE YOU COULD GET THE SAME ‘KICKED BECAUSE OF WEIRD BEHAVIOUR’ MESSAGE (OR WHATEVER IT’S CALLED). OF COURSE, FEEL FREE TO TRY IT OUT AND LEAVE COMMENTS WHILE I’M ALSO CHECKING IT! 🙂

0. Background

Kids wanted roblox. I hate windows. Roblox only works on Windows. Therefore by deduction, I also hate Roblx. They made their setup so you can play only on windows, android and maybe ios (never checked). But no linux.. what? Serious? A goofy downloadable plugin-app-game kind of thing in 2020? But let’s move on. The fact is, I compromised and made a concession that this setup will be only for this one box for this one purpose and that’s it. I had an old windows 7 machine sticker on one of my ubuntu machines.

1. Find a windows 7 cd rom or some ISO..somewhere…somehow…

Actually this step probably took a whole day. Hadn’t done this in years and windows is so lame that you have to buy their operating system (which isn’t worth paying for) and yeah. So I found some random link online and downloaded windows 7 .iso file professional to match my windows sticker (legitimate key). The fact they even made it hard to download something you already paid for was additional fuel for my Windows fire…

2. Download Virtualbox on Ubuntu

I think this is in the software centre in most Ubuntu Distros. Just search it, install it. Tip: in ubuntu software centre you need to type the whole word for it to show up easily, so ‘virtualbox’ instead of ‘virtual box’

3. Install Windows on Virtualbox

Just start up a “new” machine and point it to your downloaded ISO above. Do the usual windows install that we used to do back when we were slaves…I just accepted all the default suggestions for setting up the box and then adjusted them later. This helps assure a successful install, I believe.

4. Install Guest Additions

This section I’m breaking into two pieces because I’m not 100% sure what’s best. I ‘think’ it depends on what Windows you are using as to whether you need to install guest additions in safe or ‘regular / unsafe’ mode. At least, that’s what my hours of web-searching taught me… So, you can ‘try’ the regular unsafe mode (skip ahead) or, you can do ‘safe mode’ which takes longer and is more annoying. In either case, some of the steps / process might help you along the way so maybe worth a quick read.

A. Installing in ‘Safe’ Mode [this section needs checking / testing]

If you already tried installing guest additions in ‘unsafe mode’you might need to remove guest additions before trying again in safe mode. That’s what I did, anyway. Let’s get this done:

• When windows is booting you press F8.
• Choose ‘safe mode with networking’
• In the Virtual box menu in guest machine window, go to the ‘Devices’ menu
• Insert Guest additions from bottom of the drop down menu
• go to ‘start’ menu then ‘my computer’ and the CD rom (in windows)
• in the ROM directory, double click ‘vboxwindowsadditions-amd64’ (assuming you are 64 architecture…) and a wizard should start
• Check the ‘direct3D support (experimental)’ checkbox
• Click ‘install’
• You may get ‘trust Oracle?’ messages. Even if they can’t be trusted it’s easier to check the box and move on. After all, this is already a highly questionable game and enterprise…
• Reboot? yes
• I have notes that said I got a message like “Accept ‘basic 3D’ but I can’t confirm. If you get this, I think you should accept it…
• After machine comes back, skip ahead and do all the 2D and 3D steps in section below

Here is a helpful [link](this link helped: https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?t=55226) by the way

B. Installing in ‘Unsafe’ Mode

This part got me bad. I also had no idea about ‘Guest Additions’ somehow, so this turned out to be a good learning experience. What ‘guest additions’ does is basically install this big package which gives you more direct and quality connections to the host machines hardware. Before installing I was getting all sorts of video card driver errors. When I opened Roblox Studio it was asking to upgrade to OpenGL 2.0 or higher.

To do this step it was as simple as going to ‘Devices’ and ‘install guest additions’ and walking through the steps. Then it opened a wizard on Windows and walked through the install of the guest addition stuff. Finally it asked for a reboot and when it came back things were already working a bit better. But I was still getting driver errors on Roblox Studio…this ultimately froze the program and demanded to close program which I did. I noticed also that in my ‘device manager’ and then ‘display adaptor’ now it’s listing ‘virtualbox graphics adapter’ which should be best since it’s grabbing host hardware. And this is why I ended up doing all the steps in the ‘safe mode’ section above…

check to see if 3D acceleration is enabled by opening ‘run’ and typing ‘dxdiag’. This link will help if that sounds hard. You should see 3D acceleration as ‘enabled’.Try a round of Roblox? 🙂

5. Enable 3D acceleration in Virtualbox

This one sucked another hour or two of my short life so hopefully this can save you the pain. After doing all of the above I was still getting error after error. In my ‘Directx’ settings I was getting ‘direct3d not available’ messages and another setting ‘not available’. I assumed that Virtualbox would have installed 3D acceleration stuff by default but that was a bad assumption because probably Virtualbox is used by a lot of non-gaming developers who don’t need it nor the drain on the host hardware resources. Anyway, there is likely a good reason for it but the 3D acceleration wasn’t enabled. To enable it, shut down the guest machine, go to ‘settings’ (yellow cogwheel) then ‘display’ then check the 2d and 3d acceleration checkboxes (Not sure if i need 2D but I just wanted to be sure. Probably you should do section 6 below too before starting machine and save a step. Video card stuff may also be linked to the dreaded ‘roblox kicked unexpected client behavior’ message…

A helpful link about 3d acceration stuff.

6. Boosted video memory

I also noticed an ‘invalid setting’ in virtualbox saying that I was less than 27MB of video memory so I raised it from 16MB up to 32 to see if that made things better in the settings of the guest machine.

7. Overcoming the ‘roblox kicked unexpected client behavior’ issue

Frankly, I don’t have the answer yet but working on it. It ‘seems’ unsolvable for both Wine and Virtualbox in Ubuntu but I don’t quit easily. For now it would be nice to have others help on this one since I did all the heavy lifting. I feel there might be a browser hack or some other simple work around to stop the player from getting kicked for no reason.