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duranduranie

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 18, 2009
44
0
I want to install Sonyvegas but since I have a PowerPC G4 Mac (Version 10.4.11) I am not sure if its possible, since its only compatible with windows. I did hear of something called GuestPC - if I bought this, would it then be possible to install Sony Vegas? or do you have any other suggestions of how to run windows off my mac? Thanks! any help appreciated.
 

old-wiz

macrumors G3
Mar 26, 2008
8,331
228
West Suburban Boston Ma
Considering that sony Vegas is professional quality audio/video creation and costs $599, I doubt that any PPC mac could deal with it, even with virtual PC. the overhead for emulation of Intel is huge in itself, and throw video on top of that and it will likely be unusable.

The emulators have a huge overhead of translating Intel code to PPC code.
 

robbieduncan

Moderator emeritus
Jul 24, 2002
25,611
893
Harrogate
Virtualization on PPC is no very usable, regardless of the virtualization software you use.

That's because it's not virtualisation: it's emulation. Virtualisation is fast as it doesn't have to translate one CPU instructions set to another. This is hard and slow. Emulation does. If there was a PowerPC version of Windows (later than NT 3.5) and PowerPC compiled versions of the software you could use virtualisation rather than emulation...
 

MacHamster68

macrumors 68040
Sep 17, 2009
3,251
5
i used Q and xp on my eMac and it is to say it very polite unusable on a ppc g4 then i installed windows 2000 which was a bit more usable but the main problem was
Q only emulated a pc with ~60 !!! in words sixty mhz ok i had 1024mb ram but still more then slow

virtualpc is better as it emulates a 686 processor with 664mhz with 16mb vram and 512mb ram , which is not fast but usable on a ppc g4 ,
at least what i need it for ,office 2009 as i still have the windows version and virtual pc @ ebay did cost me £20 so way cheaper then the office 2009 version for mac
and under osx tiger i only have office 2004 for mac
but i tried youtube on virtualpc walking xp and it works ..not as good as on my iMac g3 but it works
 

flopticalcube

macrumors G4
Oh yes!

I used Q on my G5. Works ok for some minor tasks but don't expect any wonders.

Virtualization on PPC is no very usable, regardless of the virtualization software you use.
So the answer is still "no" then. We are talking about non-linear video editing here. No solution save a native one will be workable and Sony Vegas is not native, in any way.
 

MacsRgr8

macrumors G3
Sep 8, 2002
8,284
1,753
The Netherlands
To sum up:

If you have a PPC Mac (G3, G4, G5) then EMULATION is necessary to run Windows, because Windows doesn't run on PPC hardware.
This emulation "translates" PPC code to Intel (x86) and vice versa, which takes time, which means... SLOOOOOOOWWWW.....
Example app: Virtual PC (version 7.x for the G5)

Experience shows that Windows 2000 Pro running on VPC 7.x runs okay.

If you own an Intel (x86) Mac (Core Duo, Core 2 Duo, Xeon) then VIRTUALISATION is all that is needed to run Windows. As the CPU is "known" to Windows, no performance is lost because no CPU-"translation" is needed.
Grfx cards, etc are still emulated though, therefore don't expect "native" 3D grfx performance.
Example apps: Parallels, VMware, VirtualBox.

All versions of Windows run very well in these virtualisation apps.
 

MrCheeto

macrumors 68040
Nov 2, 2008
3,508
343
I tried Q and VirtualPC the other day on my G4. Windows 95 ran great, however I'm having a problem and I need to know if what I'm doing is even possible.

I was using a PCI card at the time, but I wanted Windows to be able to flash my Nvidia AGP card. Is it possible for Windows to interface with a card that way in Q or VirtualPC? Which should I use for that? I'd like to use Windows 95 because it is light and has the DOS prompt.
 
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