VPC games question (reasonable, honest)

[Bartholomew]

First: sorry about this. I've gathered that inquiries of this sort become tiresome here. I did search, and found little to help. I'm not sure if this is the right board for this.

Now. I'm not about to ask if I can play all the fancy new stuff on a Mac running Virtual PC. The most demanding games I have my eye on are Half-Life, Planescape: Torment, Gabriel Knight 3, maybe System Shock 2. Below that, I'd like Grim Fandango, the Beast Within. . . nothing, I think, that a moderately decent Pentium II couldn't do.

This is a 1.25 GHz G4 iMac, with (I guess) the newest VPC, running XP. Apparently, some of these older games don't like XP. . . but anyway. Thanks for any help, and I promise I won't ask something like this again.

[Krizoitz]

Originally posted by Bartholomew
First: sorry about this. I've gathered that inquiries of this sort become tiresome here. I did search, and found little to help. I'm not sure if this is the right board for this.

Now. I'm not about to ask if I can play all the fancy new stuff on a Mac running Virtual PC. The most demanding games I have my eye on are Half-Life, Planescape: Torment, Gabriel Knight 3, maybe System Shock 2. Below that, I'd like Grim Fandango, the Beast Within. . . nothing, I think, that a moderately decent Pentium II couldn't do.

This is a 1.25 GHz G4 iMac, with (I guess) the newest VPC, running XP. Apparently, some of these older games don't like XP. . . but anyway. Thanks for any help, and I promise I won't ask something like this again.

Don't be afraid to ask questions, thats what we are here for :-) Besides you're request seems reasonable enough. Unfortunately I never had any games to test on VPC so I really couldn't tell you. I tried running VPC version 5 on a 800mhz iMac G4 with WinXP Pro and it was a chore and a half. Things took forever. Now if you are getting pretty decent performance I would suggest finding a friend with a game from that time frame and trying it out.

[m4rc]

The problem is that VPC is just an emulator, from what I know, have tried and heard, it dosn't do games. This is because VPC dosn't emulate graphics and sound cards for one, but it's also very slow, even on a fast mac with plenty of RAM. I use VPC with 512 RAM allocated to it, and running some very simple software apps - not games - can be painfully slow.

Your best bet, as is often suggested here, and if you can afford it, buy yourself a cheap gaming PC, you should be able to find a high spec used machine for not a lot on e-bay. Obviously this is no help if you are on a really tight budget.

The next VPC is due soon, and this may change things, but I don't have details or see how it could make too much of a difference.

Hope that helps.

Marc

[virividox]

you might get around with things set on low quality, but it wont be the same as playing it on the pc.

but i suggest if you want to play games, just get an xbox (for new stuff) or get an older pc cheap.

[dermeister]

From my experience with VPC, something like half-life would be impossible.

[Stike]

Originally posted by dermeister
From my experience with VPC, something like half-life would be impossible.
Well, "impossible" is wrong. I made it to let it run on my Single 933 MHz G4 on VPC 5 with software rendering at about 0.5 frames per second!! Well, it DID run! :D

[BornAgainMac]

I played the DOS version of DOOM and QUAKE on Virtual PC 6 on my eMac and it played but the frame rates seemed slow to make the games less enjoyable but they were playable. But I was surprised I could get Microsoft Photo Draw and Paint Shop Pro to work fine with photos in Windows 2000.

[Bartholomew]

Ah, right. Well, thanks for the help, everyone.

I didn't think that it would be able to do much, anyway. It actually isn't something that I would have bought myself, but somebody else bought it to use on this computer (for some reason), so I was wondering. I was looking at some cheap old PCs that would be just enough to run these games, and thinking that I may buy one sometime in the future to catch up on some of these games I've missed. I'm in no hurry.

I don't play all that many computer games, anyway, and most of the ones I care about have been coming to Mac. Thanks again for the help.