Can you run PC games on Mac under Virtual PC...? [Archive]

Scarlet Fever

Mar 4, 2006, 06:12 AM

you can, but unless i had a quad with 4GB RAM, i wouldnt. Itll run so slow you will cry

well i exagerate, but you get my drift. I think it wouldnt run well on any G4 chip, so you would have to buy a G5 machine, and im guessing anything less than 2GHz would make you cry. The quad would run it alright, it runs everything well :D
Abosolute ****loads of ram will be needed. OS X needs about 256 by itself, VPC would need anything above 1GB to run in any form of the word "well", then the actual game needs heaps. 2GB should make it run alright (if you like slideshow grapics, as Dont Hurt Me said).

It probably would be a lot easier and cheaper just to build a PC.

MIDI_EVIL

Mar 4, 2006, 06:26 AM

Really that bad? Wow.

I think i'll build a PC then.

Thanks for replying.

Rich.

you can, but unless i had a quad with 4GB RAM, i wouldnt. Itll run so slow you will cry

steelfist

Mar 4, 2006, 07:32 AM

to be honest, i'm getting annoyed at the fact that virtual pc playing games thread are everywhere. we need a stickey to address this problem.

it's not fastsoforgotso's fault, or other people who have posted simaler thread's fault, but it's the lack of information that always stay visible in the forums. threads come and go, and when somebody else comes later, the thread will be buried in the fourth or fifth pages, and people with the same questions will not see the thread that will give him the answer.

and last but not least, please search. ;)

chicagdan

Mar 4, 2006, 08:41 AM

you can, but unless i had a quad with 4GB RAM, i wouldnt. Itll run so slow you will cry

No, that won't help either -- in Virtual PC, you can assign no more than 512 mb of RAM to the windows emulation.

Having said all of this, there are a lot of games that run great under Virtual PC -- those that have minimal graphics requirements. I play many sports simulations (Strat-o-Matic and Diamond Mind Baseball, Action PC Football) on Virtual PC and they run great.

MIDI_EVIL

Mar 4, 2006, 08:58 AM

Sorry about that.

Fair comment though, i'm fairly new to Mac (Switched in March '05) and message boards for that matter, i suppose i don't yet quite know the in's and out's.

Point taken onboard!

Thanks,
Rich.

to be honest, i'm getting annoyed at the fact that virtual pc playing games thread. we need a stickey to address this problem.

it's not fastsoforgotso's fault, or other people who have posted simaler thread's fault, but it's the lack of information that always stay visible in the forums. threads come and go, and when somebody else comes later, the thread will be buried in the fourth or fifth pages, and people with the same questions will not see the thread that will give him the answer.

and last but not least, please search. ;)

Haoshiro

Mar 4, 2006, 10:32 AM

*** Waits for Marathon4ever's reply/rant ***
:)

Unorthodox

Mar 4, 2006, 11:53 AM

You should be able to play solitaire and minesweeper ok.
Those too games just might be the most hard-core games ever!

Shadow

Mar 4, 2006, 11:58 AM

I didn't know VirtualPC has 3D support?:confused:

MIDI_EVIL

Mar 4, 2006, 12:21 PM

*** Waits for Marathon4ever's reply/rant ***
:)

What do you mean ?

Rich.

mrgreen4242

Mar 4, 2006, 01:12 PM

chicagdan

Mar 4, 2006, 01:20 PM

Just something to think about... depending on your timeline for wanting to have all this done you could hold off and see what develops with booting Windows on Intel Macs (they are getting pretty close by all accounts).

A 20" Intel iMac will make a nice gaming machine in Windows and a nice everything else machine in OS X.

Also, I haven't read anything about this being tried, but people are running Linux on Intel Macs left and right, and WINE (a Windows compatibility layer for Linux) does games pretty well. So you should be able to play quite a few Windows games on an Intel iMac running Linux with a Windows "emulator" (WINE literally means WINE Is Not an Emulator :P).

Of course, getting a high end dual core Mac mini, a Dell 20" or 23" LCD, a KVM switch, and building a nice gaming PC would be a good way to go about things as well.

All true and worth keeping in mind, but also ...

1) DarWINE is moving along
2) Virtual PC for Intel will probably run Windows in a window without the performance hit of the PPC version
3) For all we know, there could be some kind of Windows emulation built into Leopard. All the new Intel chip include virtualization and the next OS X will probably exploit the ability to run multiple installations of operating systems in some manner

I think a year from now there will be an enormous range of choices for running Windows on a Mac that exceed the current Virtual PC option (which I personally think is pretty good) and would be preferrable to dual boot.

Then again, this is another subject that's been beaten to death in dozens of other threads ...

mo-ca

Mar 4, 2006, 01:51 PM

i think this depends on the game. some games like warcraft 3 are opengl-based and so you can emulate them very nice ...
i dont know, ich battle for middleearth is opengl or directx based, but you can try it.

but if you want to game, perhaps a pc will be the best for you

GFLPraxis

Mar 4, 2006, 02:09 PM

Yeah, Virtual PC will not use your graphics card, thus, no 3D games.

Eric5h5

Mar 4, 2006, 04:31 PM

i think this depends on the game. some games like warcraft 3 are opengl-based and so you can emulate them very nice ...

No, you can't. VirtualPC has no 3D acceleration, period, OpenGL or otherwise. (Anyway, why bother trying to emulate Warcraft3 when you could just play the Mac version?)

WINE on Linux for gaming isn't possible either, because there are no 3D Linux graphics card drivers for the X1600 that ships with Intel Macs. (Don't even bother mentioning the Intel Mac Mini....)

--Eric

mrgreen4242

Mar 4, 2006, 05:04 PM

You know I won't be surprised if MS axes VPC. I would be much less surprised to see them market Vista for Mac. Why not? They wouldn't care whether you run Windows on an Apple or a Dell. Apples not gonna care (they may not want to support it, but I can't see why they'd try to stop it).

VPC for Intel is just gonna be Vista:Mac. They may justify the extra $50 they will charge for it by including some sort of VM software to let you run them side by side, or dual boot your choice. I suppose they will probably update VPC once more for the last round of PPC machines out there, but after that...

Nermal

Mar 4, 2006, 05:15 PM

Noooooo..... Vista's awful! :eek:

mrgreen4242

Mar 4, 2006, 05:26 PM

Noooooo..... Vista's awful! :eek:

Yes but it supports EFI out of the box.

balamw

Mar 4, 2006, 11:26 PM

You know I won't be surprised if MS axes VPC. I would be much less surprised to see them market Vista for Mac.
I think the one thing you're missing is that VPC has a role to play, even on Windows (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/default.mspx). MS didn't buy Connectix for the Mac version of VPC, it bought them, 'cause they saw the need to compete with VMWare, et al. The ability to run multiple OSes simultaneously is of extreme use to developers, web designers, etc... who need to keep their feet wet in different environments and versions of an OS. Plus, having a misbehaving app only take down the VM is a big deal for serious developers.

Virtualization has been around since the '286 days, but it never worked as well as the hype. It's finally become useful.

Anyhow, I thought that the Mac Business Unit clearly indicated they were working on VPC for Intel Macs, and they probably have an agreement with Apple not to specifically target Macs for a Vista install. (i.e. if the "regular" editions of Vista install on Macs, great, but don't expect MS Vista for Mac.)

B

Nermal

Mar 5, 2006, 12:01 AM

For what it's worth, the current beta of Vista won't boot on my iMac. It doesn't even show up in the Startup Disk pane. Of course, the final release may be different.

mrgreen4242

Mar 5, 2006, 01:05 AM

For what it's worth, the current beta of Vista won't boot on my iMac. It doesn't even show up in the Startup Disk pane. Of course, the final release may be different.

It won't boot natively, but I THINK that there has been some success getting it to work.

I think the one thing you're missing is that VPC has a role to play, even on Windows. MS didn't buy Connectix for the Mac version of VPC, it bought them, 'cause they saw the need to compete with VMWare, et al. The ability to run multiple OSes simultaneously is of extreme use to developers, web designers, etc... who need to keep their feet wet in different environments and versions of an OS. Plus, having a misbehaving app only take down the VM is a big deal for serious developers.

I disagree. MS has a completely different VM program in the works. I think they bought Connectix for the PPC emulation (I'm to drunk to look it up, but I'm pretty certain that it's out there). They used to have a PPC version of NT and they seemed to stop development on it. I think they just wanted the PPC emulator and the profits they could make bundling the two together.

Nermal

Mar 5, 2006, 01:32 AM

But Virtual PC is an x86 emulator, not a PPC emulator. Did Connectix have a PPC emulator that I'm not aware of?

balamw

Mar 5, 2006, 01:43 AM

I disagree. MS has a completely different VM program in the works. I think they bought Connectix for the PPC emulation (I'm to drunk to look it up, but I'm pretty certain that it's out there). They used to have a PPC version of NT and they seemed to stop development on it. I think they just wanted the PPC emulator and the profits they could make bundling the two together.
I agree on the desire for profits. :p The bundle of Office + VPC makes MS lots more money than they could otherwise.

You're right that there was a PPC version of NT4, along with MIPS and Alpha ports, but Win2K and XP were never released for anything other than x86. I think you're also right to an extent that the new version of VPC/Virtual Server will be different, as it will most likely be designed to take advantage of the virtualization technology in the new CPUs from Intel and AMD.

Here's the PR from the time of the Connectix acquisition. http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2003/Feb03/02-19PartitionPR.mspx
Lots of mention of Windows virtualization as well as Mac, even more so if you stay away from Mac specific sites to read about what became of Connectix.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/11/05/45FEvirtualmsft_1.html

Virtual Server 2005 is probably best viewed as a direct competitor to VMware’s well-entrenched GSX Server , but the degree to which Virtual Server integrates with other Microsoft server products puts it in a class of its own.
Basically MS was seeing lots of their bigger clients running systems on VMWare hosted on Linux and needed to outflank any moves in that direction. Buying Connectix killed two birds with one stone.

But Virtual PC is an x86 emulator, not a PPC emulator. Did Connectix have a PPC emulator that I'm not aware of?
I think his point was that they bought Connectix as an alternative to continuing development of native NT/PPC, and I agree with that sentiment. muche easier to work on the x86 codebase alone if an emulator is available for the 1% of users who might need it.

B

GFLPraxis

Mar 5, 2006, 01:48 AM

But Virtual PC is an x86 emulator, not a PPC emulator. Did Connectix have a PPC emulator that I'm not aware of?

I think he meant "PPC version of the emulator". There is a version of Virtual PC that runs on x86 (the Windows version) too.

balamw

Mar 5, 2006, 01:51 AM

I think he meant "PPC version of the emulator". There is a version of Virtual PC that runs on x86 (the Windows version) too.
Virtual Server is not an emulator, it's more like VMWare, it uses the underlying virtualization capabilities of the CPU to run or fast switch between two OSes running on the same CPU instruction set, and provides virtual hardware for the guest OSes to run on.

B

GFLPraxis

Mar 5, 2006, 04:36 AM

Virtual Server is not an emulator, it's more like VMWare, it uses the underlying virtualization capabilities of the CPU to run or fast switch between two OSes running on the same CPU instruction set, and provides virtual hardware for the guest OSes to run on.

B

Yeah, I know, I'm saying that it was a miswording, Mr. Green wasn't implying that VPC emulated a PPC processor.

mrgreen4242

Mar 5, 2006, 11:48 AM

You guys sussed what I was getting at pretty well. I was a bit out of it last night (surprised to see that I actually made sense to some people) but at least someone got what I was trying to say...

MS just wanted to work on one code base, and buying VPC let them do that (and make more money on each sale of Windows).

They have a different virtualization package coming out for servers soon (or maybe already?) that is not at all what VPC does. I think it's likely that if Vista doesn't have this built into the Pro editions (along with Mac booting/installing so you can just buy a $300 copy of Windows and be done with it) that there will be a Vista:Mac edition that has a form of their virtualization software with it so it can be run LIKE VPC is not (in a window) or dual booted.

Since Windows is pretty much only good for games at this point, I'd have to say that getting a Revolution and a few games is probably going to be a better way to spend $300 than Windows:Mac... unless you are a software developer or something like that and NEED to test in Windows etc.

Anyone try running VPC on an Intel Mac through Rosetta, btw? :P

Atlasland

Mar 6, 2006, 11:36 AM

Anyone try running VPC on an Intel Mac through Rosetta, btw? :P

It's not possible.

Haoshiro

Mar 6, 2006, 11:48 AM

I didn't see it mentioned so I thought I would...

You will *never* get full speeds out of an emulator like VPC even if it IS running on exactly the same hardware as its emulating.

The reason for this is both technical and simple. Put simply, an Emulator is software. No think of running a game. Normally it would be Game -> Hardware but throw in an emulator and you have Game -> Emulator -> Hardware. This means you have the Emulator reading the Game and then passing the instructions to the hardware - this is slow. You are having software run other software and then pass it to the hardware.

Even if the emulator is just reading instructions from the software and passing it directly to hardware this extra middle man is costing a lot of performance. You can get a lot of extra speed by using "dynamic recompilation" which will take the software (Game) and recompile bits of code as needed to the target platform and then run it directly, but unless I'm mistaken this ends up being pretty much like a pass through anyway and would only really be beneficial if you were emulating a different platform then your system (such as PS1 on a PC, etc.)

So while a lot could be done to make emulating a PC on an Intel Mac a ton faster then emulating a PC on a PPC Mac, you are never going to get even close to the performance of running native.

This means even if you could run games, 3D games at that, through an emulator on an Intel Mac it will end up being several years behind (like, perhaps Counterstrike or SoF2, but not something like Far Cry).

Eric5h5

Mar 6, 2006, 01:46 PM

I didn't see it mentioned so I thought I would...

You will *never* get full speeds out of an emulator like VPC even if it IS running on exactly the same hardware as its emulating.

Nobody mentioned that because it's wrong. :) If an emulator is running on the same hardware, you don't emulate that part anymore. Most of the reason VPC on PPC is so slow is because it has to translate x86 instructions to PPC instructions. If VPC is running on x86, you don't emulate x86 anymore, and then you get full speed, or very close to it.

The other cause of slowness is video hardware acceleration, or lack thereof. That's not going to change (probably), so you won't be able to run games, and scrolling through documents, etc. (anything that uses hardware acceleration) will be slower. But apps that are just CPU-based with little graphical output will run with native performance.

This isn't hypothetical; I've seen it myself. Fusion was a 68K Mac emulator that ran on Amigas (also 68K machines), and even had drivers that let you use graphics hardware acceleration (2D of course). Stuff than ran on Fusion ran at the same speed as real 68K Macs. More recently, I've used MacOnLinux, on a Linux PPC machine...no hardware acceleration, but otherwise Mac software runs at just about native speeds.

--Eric

MarkCollette

Mar 6, 2006, 04:09 PM

ijimk

Mar 6, 2006, 04:59 PM

No, that won't help either -- in Virtual PC, you can assign no more than 512 mb of RAM to the windows emulation.

Having said all of this, there are a lot of games that run great under Virtual PC -- those that have minimal graphics requirements. I play many sports simulations (Strat-o-Matic and Diamond Mind Baseball, Action PC Football) on Virtual PC and they run great.

so you think some of the old Black Isle games will do good under VPC then? (Icewind Dale 2, Baldurs Gate 2)?

balamw

Mar 6, 2006, 05:03 PM

WINE is an acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator. WINE is basically a reimplementation of Win32 APIs. It requires an x86 CPU to work. Darwine will give native Windows speed inside OS X. Well, some of the reimplementations are not as optimised, but it's relatively close. You won't be able to play the newest games, but hell you can't get most of the newest games on a Mac anyway...
I seem to recall that some of the WINE libraries were capable of outperforming Microsoft's versions. (I think it was something like networking). Anyhow, you;ll get close, but never all the way with graphically intensive apps since WINE has to translate the GDI calls into X11, and X11 isn't known for being a speed demon. It'll be interesting to see if a version of Wine emerges without this need. (like ReactOS).

B

Haoshiro

Mar 6, 2006, 05:21 PM

Nobody mentioned that because it's wrong. :) If an emulator is running on the same hardware, you don't emulate that part anymore. Most of the reason VPC on PPC is so slow is because it has to translate x86 instructions to PPC instructions. If VPC is running on x86, you don't emulate x86 anymore, and then you get full speed, or very close to it.

Actually you are mistaken. PC emulators like VPC, Qemu, Bochs, etc emulate specific hardware and not just the CPU. Simply passing instructions to the processor would not let you run something like Windows.

So in actuality PC emulators are emulating an entire range of hardware, specifically base hardware that can be ensured to run on the target systems (such as a video card Windows will recognize and have drivers for). Even still, for a software program to read instructions and then pass them to the x86 (aka, not actually emulate) there is still a speed hit because the emulator is acting as a middle-man, passing x86 code to the CPU. So sure, it's not being emulated, but it is running through the emulator and it has to or the other pieces of hardware (video, sound, etc) would not be able to get utilized.

~ Hao

Eric5h5

Mar 6, 2006, 11:20 PM

Actually you are mistaken. PC emulators like VPC, Qemu, Bochs, etc emulate specific hardware and not just the CPU.

Sorry, but you can definitely get native or near-native speed when emulating another architecture--as long as the CPU is the same--as my examples of Fusion and MacOnLinux show. The emulators do not have to hand-hold every single instruction...that would be extremely inefficient and unnecessary. Code runs natively; all you have to do is handle I/O calls.

--Eric

slooksterPSV

Mar 6, 2006, 11:35 PM

Not sure if this was explained, but here it goes:
How emulators work - ???
1 - You take instructions from the emulator and have the processor convert them to readable instructions for the PPC Processor. E.G. Win98 clocks at 300MHz on my iBook G4 1.33GHz, in siggy - XP Slower.
Try this: for ever x+y=1 on the PPC, its x+y=2 on x86 (just as an example, instructions are different) So see how fast you can convert x+y to 0+1 for mac, then see how long it takes you to convert x = 0 + 1 = y to x = 3 - 1 = y on x86 using the below problems:
x+y+y+y+x+x+y+y+x+y+x = PPC: x86:
y+y+y+y-y-x-x-x-x+y+x-x-x-x = PPC: x86:
Takes a while huh to convert figure on x86...

Better example using programming:
Instruction 2 = Add on Mac
Instruction 1 = Add on PC
If Inst = 2 then convert Inst to PC Inst

switch(instruction)
{
case 1:
asmAdd('x86', 0, 1);
break;
case 2:
asmDelete('x86', asmAdd(NULL, 0, 1), -asmAdd(NULL, 0, 1));
break;
case 3:
asmMove('x86', asmAdd(NULL, 1, 0)-asmDelete(NULL, 1, 0), asmDelete(NULL, 1, 0)+asmAdd(NULL, -1, 0));
break;
}

If instruction is one, do an assembler add for x86 for register 0 and 1 (1 and 2 respectively.
If instruction is two, do an assembler delete for x86 for register result of asmAdd of no type for register 0 and 1 (1 and 2 respectively, and negative result of asmAdd of no type for register 0 and 1 (1 and 2 respectively).
If instruction is three, do an assembler move for x86 by minus-ing the result of assembler add 1 and 0 (2 and 1 respectively) registers to the result of the deleted registers 1 and 0 for the deleted assembler register plus the added registers to move two values.

See how long that takes?

Eric5h5

Mar 7, 2006, 09:55 AM

Not sure if this was explained, but here it goes:
How emulators work -

Well... :) That's interpretive emulation, which isn't much used any more. It's all about JIT these days, where foreign code is converted to native code and the converted code is re-used, so it runs faster than converting every single instruction every time you need to run it. The downside is that it's harder to implement.

Rosetta is basically JIT, the 68K emulation in OS 8-9 is JIT, even VPC is JIT...imagine how slow it would really be if it was interpretive. (e.g., Basilisk II emulates 68K Macs on various platforms, and while it has JIT for x86, PPC uses interpretive, and therefore my 2.5GHz G5 gets approximately 80MHz 68040 speeds.)

--Eric

Sdashiki

Mar 7, 2006, 10:33 AM

its been my experience that you CAN play PC games that are 5+yrs old on current VPC versions.

Like when VPC came out, GTA for the PC was out (the original top view one) and I tried to play it on VPC, didnt work so well, the video was messed up but it worked without frame skips.

But you dont buy VPC to play games. You buy it to run keygens, BIOS programs and little crap that you cant run on a mac.

AND OF COURSE, unless you must DO NOT RUN XP on VPC, its a waste of frames and computing power. Run Win98, the last "solid" OS.

cubist

Mar 7, 2006, 10:39 AM

As someone who has actually USED it, I can tell you, VPC on Windows works fine and runs programs FAST. You cannot use 3D acceleration, of course.

I have used VPC on Windows to run Linux, BeOS and Plan9 as well. I was not able to get OS/2 Warp to boot, unfortunately. I will try that sometime in Virtual PC 2 and see if it works. Anyone who has gotten OS/2 Warp to boot, please email me at rickr765@yahoo.com with instructions.

Haoshiro

Mar 7, 2006, 10:44 AM

Sorry, but you can definitely get native or near-native speed when emulating another architecture--as long as the CPU is the same--as my examples of Fusion and MacOnLinux show. The emulators do not have to hand-hold every single instruction...that would be extremely inefficient and unnecessary. Code runs natively; all you have to do is handle I/O calls.
--Eric

"near-native" here is what I find funny. The point isn't whether or not the "Code runs natively" it's that the code is going through the emulator first. So sure, all that code can run at "near-native" speed (read: not native) but that doesn't mean you aren't getting a performance hit from the emulator; let alone those other non-CPU devices its emulating.

Sdashiki

Mar 7, 2006, 11:02 AM

who cares, you dont run VPC to run top of the line newest and greatest programs.

If you do, you're silly.

If something is running slow on VPC, you shouldnt be running it on VPC, because if the slowdown means so much to you, youd use a PC instead.

Eric5h5

Mar 7, 2006, 10:36 PM

"near-native" here is what I find funny. The point isn't whether or not the "Code runs natively" it's that the code is going through the emulator first.

It's not, though. You seem to be under the misapprehension that the emulator somehow has to inspect every byte of code before "letting" the CPU run it, or something. That's simply not the case.

So sure, all that code can run at "near-native" speed (read: not native)

Native. You have to trick code trying to run in supervisor mode into thinking it is, when in actuality it's not (can't very well have that when running an emulator, can you), which has a tiny bit of a performance hit, but other than that, performance is the same. Fusion, MacOnLinux, SheepShaver (PPC), VirtualPC (on Windows)...how many examples do you need?

What it comes down to is this: "You will *never* get full speeds out of an emulator like VPC even if it IS running on exactly the same hardware as its emulating" isn't really true. 99% of full speed counts as full speed in my book. "Even if the emulator is just reading instructions from the software and passing it directly to hardware this extra middle man is costing a lot of performance" is certainly not true at all. That's just not how it works.

And this isn't my opinion...Running the CPU performance rating test in Speedometer in Classic gives me 89.944 (average of 10 iterations). Running Speedometer in Sheepshaver on the same hardware gives me 89.962 (10 iterations). See? Precisely native speed.

but that doesn't mean you aren't getting a performance hit from the emulator

Except for the supervisor mode stuff (which is minor), you're really not.

let alone those other non-CPU devices its emulating.

Typically you don't actually emulate those devices, but provide drivers that present functionality of the host system as hardware to the emulator, so you still get essentially native speed. Sound output on MacOnLinux is a good example...it provides a custom system extension that makes the Linux sound driver look like a "sound card" to MacOS. So you get full-speed sound output through whatever sound card you happen to have running. (A Soundblaster of some sort, in the case of my Linux PPC machine.)

I've been running this sort of thing for years and years...you DO GET native performance (or close enough) when you don't have to emulate the CPU. If MS releases VPC for Intel Macs, it will run Windows at native speeds (or close enough), and if they manage some sort of OpenGL "fake graphics card" for 3D acceleration, it will play games, even recent ones, very well indeed; nearly equivalent to similar Windows machine hardware. Don't count on the 3D thing though....

--Eric