What is Virtual PC?

do a forum search- youll find all youll ever need to know and more!

It's an emulator that emulates x86 OSs on the Mac.

For example on my Mac I use VPC 6 to run:
Debian
Knoppix
SuSE
DOS
Windows 95 SE
Windows 2000 Pro
Windows XP Pro

You should know that VPC is very slow, and you can't play any games other than solitare, or brows the internet. (the only OS that I have that runs remotly well is DOS 😀 )

Don't try

Don't even try and play games on Virtual PC. It's slower than a snail on drugs 😛 . You'll be lucky if you don't pull your hair out waiting for the start menu to pop up after clicking it, it literally can take 5-10 seconds for it to appear after clicking. Now this is coming from experience on a 700Mhz G4, so 1.25ghz should be a little faster but still nowhere near the speed necessary to play games on more than 10fps, and thats wishful thinking.
Virtual PC 7 should be out soon, and rumor has it that it has native Video Card acceleration rather than having to emulate it in the current VPC6, but it still needs to completely emulate an x86 processor (as you'll find in the humble wintel). In other words, not very much faster, and with a 32MB card in the lower end of the market like an eMac hardly any noticeable difference at all. Buying a bucketload of RAM might help though.....
There are two ways to get around this:
1. Fork out a few hundred and get a cheap/fast PC box, or even a console.
2. See if any of your games are available for mac, cos if they are you'll be fine and dandy. On the other hand if you already own all your PC games I don't think you'll want to be forking out all you hard earned again...
Hope I was of some help, sorry to burst your bubble. 🙂

johnbro23 said:

Would, say, RollerCoaster Tycoon run well on VPC? The graphics on that game are pretty basic.

I convinced my parents to get me this computer so they could get me out of his office in the other room. That computer is a 850 Mhz Pentium 3 with 512 Mb of RAM. How would that compare with a PC emulator on my 1.25 Ghz eMac with 768 Mb RAM?

Click to expand...

Emulated you're looking at a 300Mhz Pentium 2. Sometimes it might get up to 400Mhz. At most it can get up to 512MB (the max as I see it). VRAM is 16MB w/o 3D acceleration. Even though those Maxis games look very simple, I'm sure a 3D element is in place that would make it impossible to play. I got about 3FPS with Half-Life and 3FPS on NFS3. Both pre-'99 games. Even though more taxing than RCT, I wouldn't wager $130 just to find out. Especially since you could get 850Mhz Pentium 3 systems for less than that.