TF2, VMWare and my quest for hats

I love my vanity items. Top hats, viking helms, the fez, even odd squid thingys telling me to burn stuff, I love them all. On my quest to collect them all (Oddly Reminiscence of Pokemon of my youth) I figured why not make a bunch of accounts to idle and collect stuff for me...

Enter VMWare. It seems with the latest version of VMWare workstation you can run HL2/TF2, idle, and then trade back the items to my main account easily.

Once you have Steam and Team Fortress 2 installed, start TF2 with the following options:

-textmode -nosound -noipx -novid -nopreload -maxplayers 2 +sv_lan 1 +map "itemtest"

-textmode : Most important, does NOT start the graphics engine. Used for severs but works for our purpose.
-nosound : easily handled in VMware by removing the sound card, but why not
-noipx : prevents a possible crash bug in VMWare's IPX drivers (disabling networking, which is bad for this)
-novid : Don't play the intro video. (without this, it MAY play the video with no way to exit)
-nopreload : Don't preload any resources. Reduces memory footprint
-maxplayers 2 : Dont want people lagging us out
+sv_lan 1 : Since we're starting a server, make it lan only. This way it doesn't update to the master server list and people won't see it in their server lists.
+map "itemtest" : New map, designed to help workshopers test their new items. Its small and has a low memory footprint, excellent for us.

Now just load up the game, and sit back, and play on your main account.  You can turn off the VM in about 15 hours to make sure everything you can get in the week has been gotten.

TF2 in Text mode inside of VMWare 6.x

Once you have a stash of items, you can remove the command line options and join a server with your other account and trade them back.

Now to get a Bill's hat...