Virtual Machine on SD, is it possible?

[theberto]

Hi, I just bought a Macbook pro 15inch mid 2015 with AMD gpu, I've always been a WIndows user, and now I've switched to Mac mainly beacuse I need a portable but productive machine for the adobe suite.
I am not a gamer, however, there are 2 games that I used to play sometimes on my windows pc : pes6 and GTA san andreas (both with mods). Since I would like to still play with them sometimes, I was thinking about installing a windows virtual machine (xp or 7) on my macbook. but I didn't want to waste my ssd memeory (also beacasue these 2 games don't require any particular fast memory) so I was thinking about installing the virtual machine on an external SD card (maybe a 64/128gb one) and put it on my macbook just when I want to play. do you think it's possibile? has someone tried it?
thank you!

 

[keysofanxiety]

Possible, yes. Recommended, definitely not. SD cards are very, very slow, and loading games from that would be a horrible experience. Add in the fact it's an entire VM on there and you'll have a bad time.

Unless they're older games, running games through a VM would hamper the experience anyway. San Andreas should be fine but absolute best case scenario for futureproofing gaming is installing Windows through BootCamp, to make the most of the dGPU. Otherwise it will have to be a case of running a VM through the internal SSD.

If you're only going to play older games, a third option would be to install the older games through Crossover, so it runs as a Mac application but without the hassle of installing an entire OS, for a much smaller storage footprint: https://www.codeweavers.com/products/crossover-mac/download/

It's a great application and I've had older Windows games/applications running through that flawlessly -- Star Wars EP1 Racer, Guitar Pro 5, and others such as that. I can see that San Andreas has good compatibility with Crossover (https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/grand-theft-auto-san-andreas), so that would be worth looking into.

 

[theberto]

Yes, actually I am just going to play those 2 old games, so that would be a nice solution for me but I have a question: with Crossover is it possibile to add mod to the game?

 

[keysofanxiety]

Yes, actually I am just going to play those 2 old games, so that would be a nice solution for me but I have a question: with Crossover is it possibile to add mod to the game?

Sorry for the belated response. Yeah mods would work, providing the mod involves dragging files into the game install folder. You can view/edit Crossover application files (browsing the Program Files x86, etc.) once you've created the bottle. So it's pretty easy to apply no-CD patches too.

I can't think what mods wouldn't involve that process, unless the mod is packaged in a self-extracting/installing executable and available in no other form... then it might be a trifle tricker to install.

 

[Tech198]

if you felling up to it, run Wineskin (it's free), but Crossover is paid. Check the AppDB first to make sure it works.

 

[FreakinEurekan]

Put the VM on a USB 3.0 flash drive, it'll be much faster than a SD card. One of the super compact styles like this would probably be a good choice: http://a.co/7SnGiJ4

 

[bartvk]

The above poster has a good tip, I've got one of these ultrafit drives and they're really nice. However I assume you'll game at home. Why not just get an external SSD and run your VM from there? I've run Parallels from a rather mediocre external SSD (over USB 3.0) and it was lightning fast.