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VPC games question (reasonable, honest)

B

Bartholomew

macrumors newbie
Original poster
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.
 
Re: VPC games question (reasonable, honest)

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.
Click to expand...

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.
 
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
 
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.
 
Originally posted by dermeister
From my experience with VPC, something like half-life would be impossible.
Click to expand...
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! 😀
 
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.
 
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.
 
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