Running Angry Birds on the BUILD Samsung Tablet with Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Alon Fliess — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 19:03:00 GMT

If you try to install and run Angry Birds on your BUILD machine, you’ll soon find that you can’t run it because there is no support for OpenGL. AT the first it looks like no support in the beta of Windows 8, but the problem is actually happens also on old Windows version, and the real cause is lack of OpenGL support is in the Display Adapter driver. I decided that no matter what, I am going to run Angry Birds on my machine. After several hours I can say that I’ve made it. But not without getting deep into the problem.

First I surfed to Samsung support site and downloaded the Windows 7 display adapter driver of a similar commercial PC tablet.

Trying to install this driver as it is, had failed, the driver does not support Windows 8. I got to the inf file (…/Graphics/kit39482.inf) and in the file I found these lines:

;
; Driver information
;

[Manufacturer]
%Intel% = IntelGfx, NTamd64.5.1, NTamd64.6.0, NTamd64.6.2

[IntelGfx.NTamd64.5.1]
; no install on XP

[IntelGfx.NTamd64.6.2]
; no install on Win8

[IntelGfx.NTamd64.6.0]
%iSNBGM1% = iSNBM0, PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_0106&SUBSYS_C0BE144D ;; Nike-Tab
%iSNBGM2% = iSNBM0, PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_0116&SUBSYS_C0BE144D
%iSNBGM2P% = iSNBM0, PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_0126&SUBSYS_C0BE144D

There is only support for Windows Vista & 7.

First I checked in the Device Manager under the Display adapters entry that the Hardware Ids and Compatible Ids matches PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_0106&SUBSYS_C0BE144D, and it did. This means that the driver is compatible with the hardware but not with the OS or at least they didn’t tested it yet.

I’ve changed the inf file to:

;
; Driver information
;

[Manufacturer]
%Intel% = IntelGfx, NTamd64.5.1, NTamd64.6.0, NTamd64.6.2

[IntelGfx.NTamd64.5.1]
; no install on XP

; Cooked for Win8
[IntelGfx.NTamd64.6.2]
%iSNBGM1% = iSNBM0, PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_0106&SUBSYS_C0BE144D ;; Nike-Tab
%iSNBGM2% = iSNBM0, PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_0116&SUBSYS_C0BE144D
%iSNBGM2P% = iSNBM0, PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_0126&SUBSYS_C0BE144D

When I tried to install the driver it failed without provide enough information. I tried to install it manually to find out that the catalog file does not contains the correct hash for the inf file. This means that I had to recreate the catalog file and resign it. These steps are the same steps that you do when you build your own driver, so I went to the WDK command line, I created a certificate, I created the catalog file and signed it. This link provide the steps requires to self sign your driver. If you follow my steps, don’t skip the part of creating the cat file, since you’ve change the inf file.

After taking the last actions, I could install the driver. However after reboot I found that the driver can’t start because of forgetting to tell Windows that it is OK to load self signing drivers. To do so on the Windows 8 BUILD machine, I had to go to the BIOS (pressing both volume up and down together on boot time) and turning off the Secure Boot option:

Now I could tell Windows to load a self signing driver using:

bcededit –set TESTSIGNING ON

After a reboot I’ve succeeded to load the driver and run Angry Bird on my Windows 8 Tablet. The driver works pretty well most of the time :

I do have some glitches when starting Angry Birds Space:

But restarting it solves the problems:

Enjoy!

class Alon : public CPP, public Architecture : Angry Birds

Running Angry Birds on the BUILD Samsung Tablet with Windows 8 Consumer Preview