Has anyone played with Virtual PC 2007 lately?

[Dronecatcher]

VPC 4+ always showed 300-400Mhz "rated" speed from Connectix's dynamic CPU/FPU emulation in DirectX, this is only showing you're obsessed with numbers than understanding limitations of the hardware emulation Connectix/Microsoft used. VPC 1-2.x shows in DirectX as a Pentium 133/166, VPC 3 displays 166MMX, etc. Less FPU usage based software= faster CPU emulation is fairly easy to understand of how it influences VPC.

The bigger question is why aren't you running Windows XP SP3 with your VirtualPC if the goal is to push your useful life of PowerPC hardware? On Windows XP you can use 512MB w/o any registry hackery to Win9x/Win2k.

What? You've lost me now. I'm neither obsessed with numbers nor endeavoring to get speed bumps with "registry hackery to Win9x/Win2k" - I've simply responded to your suggestion that VPC can achieve 800Mhz performance as opposed to the 133Mhz I'm getting - I'm not chasing benchmarks only trying to run software based on your advice.

 

[happyfrappy]

I'm not saying you're doing any registry hacking. With WinXP you get a slight bump over trying to endlessly tweak or hunt down ways to push Win2k--Win98/Win2k certain things hit the wall. I only dusted off my MSDN CD box to run a few games trying to see why Win2k seemed "slow" to you, didn't expect the gap of Win2k vs XP varied that widely. Normally I use Windows XP with 384-512 MB of RAM, maybe when Microsoft ate Connectix they took advantage of under-the-hood(undocumented XP kernel hooks).

As far as Win98SE, a common reg tweak was RAM cache/buffer... not sure how to do that with NT4/Win2k but the old Connectix forums had some discussion about it before Microsoft deleted those forums.

 

[happyfrappy]

Found my DVD of Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate, even though the requirements say 1Ghz(Pentium III?) and (256 MB minimal)/512 MB of RAM as recommended it still runs... took an hour to install it and ~25 minutes to install Painter Photo Essentials 4. Painting/drawing/sketch filters take ~5-8 minutes on 800x600 sized photos.

I think this is reasonable proof VirtualPC with Windows XP still packs a usable punch after all these years.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Found my DVD of Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2 Ultimate, even though the requirements say 1Ghz(Pentium III?) and (256 MB minimal)/512 MB of RAM as recommended it still runs... took an hour to install it and ~25 minutes to install Painter Photo Essentials 4. Painting/drawing/sketch filters take ~5-8 minutes on 800x600 sized photos.

I think this is reasonable proof VirtualPC with Windows XP still packs a usable punch after all these years.

We'll have to agree to disagree - I wouldn't be happy with bitmap filters taking 5 - 8 minutes. I have Corel Photopaint 10 under VPC and it takes between 1 and 10 seconds with filters on SVGA size images and that's in the range of what it's pretending to be - a 133/166 Pentium.
I wouldn't say an app performing at an excruciatingly slow speed is evidence of 800Mhz performance.

The difference between a poorly performing audio app and a graphics app, is that the audio app shows you in realtime how it's struggling, whereas, the graphic app takes it's time to complete it's task.

 

[roadbloc]

I use VPC 7 for XP so I can run my web design software for my website. It can be sluggish at times, but it works well.

 

[Dronecatcher]

I use VPC 7 for XP so I can run my web design software for my website. It can be sluggish at times, but it works well.

Well, Serif Web Plus X5 minimum hardware requirement is a "Windows-based PC" - so you're on safe ground there
You're on a G4 iMac aren't you? That was my first Mac back in 2002 and VPC4 was the first software I bought online...I was on dial up which cut off after 2 hours use and you had to reconnect, I was in a panic that the download wouldn't complete in time!

 

[happyfrappy]

We'll have to agree to disagree - I wouldn't be happy with bitmap filters taking 5 - 8 minutes. I have Corel Photopaint 10 under VPC and it takes between 1 and 10 seconds with filters on SVGA size images and that's in the range of what it's pretending to be - a 133/166 Pentium.
I wouldn't say an app performing at an excruciatingly slow speed is evidence of 800Mhz performance.

Comparing a product released in 2000 to a product released in 2004 isn't a reliable measurement, CPU/FPU dynamic emulation varies by the instruction set a program uses and the transition to XP/Vista impacted some programs in some degree.
My photo used in Painter Photo Essentials 4 was resized at 100% quality from 3072x2304 to 800x600, quite sure the file wasn't >500kb and the program is fairly heavy on CPU usage even on Core 2 processors. I used Painter Photo Essentials 4 on my old Thinkpad T61(Core 2 Duo T7300 2Ghz) a few times in the past, it takes close to 2-3 minutes on oil painting with random strokes and certain detailed sketches depending upon photos used so mileage varies quite a bit from photo to photo. I'll have to post the test photos onto Flickr.

Found the product page on Amazon and it Painter Photo Essentials 4 requires a Pentium III 700Mhz: http://www.amazon.com/Corel-Painter-Essentials-Win-Mac/dp/B000WCQCE4

 

[Dronecatcher]

Comparing a product released in 2000 to a product released in 2004 isn't a reliable measurement

I agree completely on that, I was comparing Photopaint results though as an indicator of what is a reasonable time for a filter to complete.
Obviously it depends on what the filters are - I tried a few, some are instant, some take 10 seconds. My point is, if any filter is taking nearly 8 minutes, then that isn't an acceptable level of performance - if however, the same result was achieved on a 800Mhz PC then, yes, that would indicate VPC is keeping up.

This all goes back to my original comments to the OP - try stuff and see what works or what doesn't for yourself. And if a Googler lands on these pages looking for VPC performance stats, I can stand by my claims that a 133 is easily achieved with VPC - based on experience and having a 166 laptop at hand to compare with.

 

[mzs.112000]

I agree completely on that, I was comparing Photopaint results though as an indicator of what is a reasonable time for a filter to complete.
Obviously it depends on what the filters are - I tried a few, some are instant, some take 10 seconds. My point is, if any filter is taking nearly 8 minutes, then that isn't an acceptable level of performance - if however, the same result was achieved on a 800Mhz PC then, yes, that would indicate VPC is keeping up.

This all goes back to my original comments to the OP - try stuff and see what works or what doesn't for yourself. And if a Googler lands on these pages looking for VPC performance stats, I can stand by my claims that a 133 is easily achieved with VPC - based on experience and having a 166 laptop at hand to compare with.

I once had an 800mhz PC, and when using GIMP to do resizes, crops, and converting from color to back/white(for DOS), it could do that in less than 15 seconds, IMO if something like that takes 8 minutes, then it is sub-par.

Oh, and with the VPC getting you 133Mhz, if you can boot to OS 9(not classic mode), then running VPC5 might give a performance boost over VPC on OS X, some say it is 70% faster, others say it is 30% faster, you're mileage may vary.
But even with 30% performance increase, 133Mhz + 30% = 173Mhz so I guess that would be significant for CPU-heavy programs, maybe not that much on FPU programs.

 

[mzs.112000]

I agree completely on that, I was comparing Photopaint results though as an indicator of what is a reasonable time for a filter to complete.
Obviously it depends on what the filters are - I tried a few, some are instant, some take 10 seconds. My point is, if any filter is taking nearly 8 minutes, then that isn't an acceptable level of performance - if however, the same result was achieved on a 800Mhz PC then, yes, that would indicate VPC is keeping up.

This all goes back to my original comments to the OP - try stuff and see what works or what doesn't for yourself. And if a Googler lands on these pages looking for VPC performance stats, I can stand by my claims that a 133 is easily achieved with VPC - based on experience and having a 166 laptop at hand to compare with.

I once had an 800MHz PC, and all image filters took less than 15 seconds, and to me, anything more than that is slow.
So if one is taking 8 minutes, that to me, would be horrible performance, certainly not 800MHz.

Oh, and about you're 133MHz performance, I have read, that VPC on OS 9 can be between 30% and 70% faster than VPC on OS X.
I don't know if you can boot in to OS 9 on any of you're machines AFAIK 1.0TiBook was the last that could boot directly to OS9. But if you can maybe VPC can do a 166 or 233 instead of 133MHz.

 

[happyfrappy]

I agree completely on that, I was comparing Photopaint results though as an indicator of what is a reasonable time for a filter to complete.
Obviously it depends on what the filters are - I tried a few, some are instant, some take 10 seconds. My point is, if any filter is taking nearly 8 minutes, then that isn't an acceptable level of performance - if however, the same result was achieved on a 800Mhz PC then, yes, that would indicate VPC is keeping up.

Other filters non-paint/sketch worked near instant, the paint/sketch type stuff pegs the CPU/FPU side which was where I wanted to compare to an actual PC. Disabling the random brush/sketch strokes shaved off a bunch of minutes.
Decided to run CCleaner on the disk image, Corel left over 300 MB of temp/cache files after installing. Ran the built-in defrag and shutdown for VPC Disk Assistant to convert free space, virtual disk went from a whopping 12GB to 6.5GB.

 

[Dronecatcher]

Oh, and about you're 133MHz performance, I have read, that VPC on OS 9 can be between 30% and 70% faster than VPC on OS X.

I did some tests a while back on OS9 and VPC4 was slightly better than 5.
I've currently got VPC4 under OS9 on my Powerbook - it handles all the programs VPC7 on my Dual G5 can do, strangely, anything it can't do, neither can the G5. Despite the massive leap in CPU power on the G5, they both have the same apparent Windows CPU threshold.

 

[roadbloc]

I don't know about the on a Mac, but I've used VPC on windows for years, and I recently came up with a strategy for running windows 98se that will run on 16mb to 24mb of recommended Ram and can run on 8mb of ram instead of 2k or XP that are slow as heck.

The biggest problem is having a web Browser you can run either IE6 SP1 that doesn't work, or you can get up to Firefox 2.0.0.20 that isn't much better, I've found though that if you get Netscape Navigator 9 it works about like IE6 used to work and isn't perfect but it's a small size and works okay with Google as your homepage it'll load yahoo but it looks to weird to use IE6 on the other hand want do either. Then none the old browsers are secure or up to date but the same problems exist even for XP except that it still supports the latest Firefox but win2k can only have up to Firefox 12.

to find the older browsers that still work under 98se you just have to search for oldapps.com they have them.

If it helps, KernelEx is very useful for getting XP and 2000 apps to function on ME and 98 setups. Last time I used it, it functioned fine with both the latest versions of Opera and Firefox.

Well, Serif Web Plus X5 minimum hardware requirement is a "Windows-based PC" - so you're on safe ground there
You're on a G4 iMac aren't you? That was my first Mac back in 2002 and VPC4 was the first software I bought online...I was on dial up which cut off after 2 hours use and you had to reconnect, I was in a panic that the download wouldn't complete in time!

I actually run VP7 on my PowerBook which is a bit more powerful than my iMac. I haven't tried it on my iMac yet because I have the feeling it may make it cry. (And because I've lost my license key since so I can't even get it installed.)

 

[LightBulbFun]

I may have gotten board today. The iBooks spec is 14 inch 1.33ghz 768MB of ram. I have windows 98 and windows 2000 installed it runs better then I expected but I have not done much in the OSs (VPC 7 if your wondering)

 

[Dronecatcher]

View attachment 569898 I may have gotten board today. The iBooks spec is 14 inch 1.33ghz 768MB of ram. I have windows 98 and windows 2000 installed it runs better then I expected but I have not done much in the OSs (VPC 7 if your wondering)

I think VPC is fantastic software for PPC and works great as long as your expectations are realistic.
Even if you have no practical use for it, it's still 'fun' for exploring old operating systems...or reminding you of their horrors....

 

[LightBulbFun]

I think VPC is fantastic software for PPC and works great as long as your expectations are realistic.
Even if you have no practical use for it, it's still 'fun' for exploring old operating systems...or reminding you of their horrors....

exactly why I fired it up today apart from being board lol... I think VPC works well. im going to try windows POS 2009 on it at some point (its basicly windows XP stripped down) I did try it a year or 2 ago on my MDD with XP, I could not and Can still not get CPU Z to launch any one got any Suggestions?

 

[Dronecatcher]

could not and Can still not get CPU Z to launch

Neither could I in any combination of VPC/OS. I've found that profiling/benchmarking software is meaningless in VPC (eg my 667 PB reports a faster CPU than my Dual G5). I'd just optimize the OS as much as you can and try installing/running whatever....results may vary

 

[Altemose]

View attachment 569898 I may have gotten board today. The iBooks spec is 14 inch 1.33ghz 768MB of ram. I have windows 98 and windows 2000 installed it runs better then I expected but I have not done much in the OSs (VPC 7 if your wondering)

Rolling with no keyboard?

 

[LightBulbFun]

Rolling with no keyboard?

keyboards? Pah who needs keyboards (this iBook G4 had a Bad keyboard so I just removed it and chucked it. 14 inch iBook G4 keyboards are so hard to find here. the iBook G4 also had a Dead HDD so I have it set to auto boot from a USB stick I have Jabbed into it)

 

[happyfrappy]

Managed to get Microsoft Train Simulator to run on VirtualPC, it requires a Pentium II 266+ but I had to crank up the virtual video card memory. Speed wise quite sure XP SP3 feels snappier than Win98SE when it comes to later DirectX stuff for some odd reason. Civilization 3 works, you'll need to enable CPU compatibility via script menu... VPC4 it worked without doing that.

Descent 3 crashed with a boatload of DirectX errors on Win98SE(VPC6) yet ran perfectly when my old iMac G3 w/VPC4 ran Win95 & 98SE way back in the early 2000s... got it working on XP via patch but I found that a strange oddity.

SimCity 4 actually runs in VPC, somewhat slow but playable at 800x600

Need for Speed High Stakes, Fly2K(2002 Edition) & Thief Gold I may test later.

exactly why I fired it up today apart from being board lol... I think VPC works well. im going to try windows POS 2009 on it at some point (its basicly windows XP stripped down) I did try it a year or 2 ago on my MDD with XP, I could not and Can still not get CPU Z to launch any one got any Suggestions?

You need dotnet up to v4.x and a few other support libraries. If you can't get CPU Z to run, chances are some newer applications may refuse to run too. (I have Office 2003 installed so most likely dotnet was installed at some point)

 

[LightBulbFun]

what I find interesting is im pretty sure CPU Z worked OOB in a windows 2K vm i setup in vmware using the same ISO i used for virtual PC... also it never launched in XP ether soo... but I will look into the .net thing you mentioned

 

[LightBulbFun]

tried to install .net 3.5 (i dont think 4 is compatible but correct me if I am wrong) and in typical windows fashion it failed complaining about a missing DLL and the last thing i want to do is mess with DLLs LOL

 

[LightBulbFun]

ok so 3 posts in a row... Hopefully thats allowed I prefer not to edit Posts. anyway I just setup a fresh install of win 2k in vmware no guest editions right from the CD got CPU Z installed and it launched fine... so Im going to assume CPU Z is conflicting with something in VPC7

 

[MagicBoy]

.NET 4 will go on XP. 2K is limited to .NET 3.x

.NET generally frequently goes wrong and stops updating or working IME on 2K/XP. Usually quicker to format and re-install then to try and troubleshoot the issue!

 

[Dronecatcher]

As an indicator of how inaccurate CPU scores are, results from dxdiag across various installs:

G3 500Mhz 512Mb RAM OS9 VPC4 Win 2000 400Mhz
G4 667Mhz 1Gb RAM OS9 VPC4 Win 98SE 533Mhz
G5 2.3Ghz 4.5Gb RAM OSX VPC7 Win 2000 532Mhz
G5 2.3Ghz 4.5Gb RAM OSX VPC7 Win XP 530Mhz