Microsoft Virtual PC

[mosesff]

I'm running Microsoft Virtual PC and installed XP Professional, unfortunately I wanted to use it to play FF7 PC, as I can't play it on my Vista Ultimate x64, is there a way to transfer my files to my Virtual Hard drive as the Virtual PC doesn't pick up any of my internal or external hard drives.

[Mad]

Well Virtual Machines cant run 3D acceleration.
Maybe VMware workstation, it has basic Dx8 support.

[mosesff]

FF7 for the PC uses DirectX 6, and a very very low resolution.
Oh I see ok.

[Xtreme2damax]

If the game doesn't require any kind of Pixel Shading or DX9 features you should be able the play the game on VMware.

I played GTAIII using VMware before just to test it out and it played pretty decently using VMware on even my Celeron D 330 @ 2.66 GHZ machine with one GB of DDR Ram, and a Geforce FX 5500 albeit some minor graphical issues.

If you run a Virtual Machine, install XP over Vista on it. Vista is slow as hell on a VM if you don't have a lot of ram and a good CPU, however Vista runs fine on real hardware as opposed to an emulated virtual machine.

[S.SubZero]

The video card VPC virtualizes is a circa 1994 Trio card. It's VESA, and has no idea what DirectX even is.

[mosesff]

that's cool I might use it for things I can't do on vista ult x64 because of 32 bit drivers. Does it have support to allocate memory like virtual pc. Wow GTA 3 that's up my street I wanted to play vice city and san andreas on it too maybe at this rate world of warcraft.

1994 that's just worrying. That's what you get when you get a free MS product.

[Xtreme2damax]

Oh, I didn't realize he was referring to Virtual PC. For some reason I seemed to of skimmed over that part.

I would use either VMware Player or Workstation. Both include 3D acceleration and should be able to play simple 3D games like GTAIII or similar and run fairly decently.

While VMware Player is free, VMware Workstation is a commercial product.

Avoid Virtual PC at all costs, it isn't really worth using other than for some simple tasks or a application development environment.

VMware's free VMware player stomps the crap out of Virtual PC, however the emulated graphics are only good for DX8 games and games that don't require DX9 features or Pixel Shading.


Also don't use VMware server, the free VMware server lacks any kind of video acceleration. As mentioned use VMware Player or Vmware Workstation if you want to purchase it.

However the free Vmware Player should be sufficient for what you need.

If you get stuck at all with VMware or don't know how to make VM's in it I can provide you with the freely and legally redistributable files I have archived on my PC to create Virtual Machines.

[mosesff]

Thanks i'm installing it now.

[Xtreme2damax]

Originally Posted by Xtreme2damax

While VMware Player is free, VMware Workstation is a commercial product.

The quote above is corrected from my last post. I accidentally said, "While VMware Player is free, Virtual PC is a commercial product."

I made a mistake as a result of it being late at night an me being extremely tired.

@ mosesff: Good luck, let us know how it works and if you have any problems I'll try to help you solve them to the best of my ability.

[mosesff]

Well i've taken the liberty of attaching an image of VMWare Workstation which I have to say is very fast, awesome and like running an operating system mainly rather than virtually. Much Much faster than virtual PC.

I really think its worth it

Now could you tell me how I would use my files in say an external hard drive on VMWare?

Cheers.

[mosesff]

That reminded me about your comp specs running GTA 3, that I used my onboard 6100 before I upgraded it, and it played GTA Vice City and GTA 3 that I had got at the time, quite well. I even tried it on other computers and they kept messing up the game even though they had 3.0GHz processors. Oh and that was a year ago.

Never mind, it works, i've located how to map drives, but I can't open FF7, seems to be the program (FF7).

[Xtreme2damax]

Originally Posted by mosesff

That reminded me about your comp specs running GTA 3, that I used my onboard 6100 before I upgraded it, and it played GTA Vice City and GTA 3 that I had got at the time, quite well. I even tried it on other computers and they kept messing up the game even though they had 3.0GHz processors. Oh and that was a year ago.

Never mind, it works, i've located how to map drives, but I can't open FF7, seems to be the program (FF7).

What error do you get when trying to run FF7? Have you enabled Direct3D support or acceleration options for your Virtual Machine?

Also try updating DirectX for the XP VM to see if it helps.

If you can post the error you get or describe the problem I may be able to find a way to solve it.

Also what are the minimum requirements for FF7 PC, this may help to determine if a Virtual Machine is adequate for running this game.

[mosesff]

I havn't installed Direct X on the virtual machine and am not sure for acceleration options, its just that it refuses to open (ff7.exe) and even when I patch it, same. The config when I open it, shows on my processes on Task manager but doesn't show as a window on my screen. Also it looks like it will load but doesn't. It just loads for 2 seconds and then stops.
Don't know what to do.

[Afrodziac]

Virtualbox is open source. I wish I knew a programmer who could program VB to have a guest OS use one GPU, (in a dual gpu system) while the host uses the other gpu.

[mosesff]

Whats V-Box like? When you say open source do you mean its created by general computer users or its for linux or free or what?

[Mad]

Open source - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
VirtualBox comes in 2 ways, both free:
Open-source, source code only distribution.
And the closed source, binary (linux, windows, mac).

If you are on linux, and wanna run a linux guest, you can add OpenGL to the guest using VMGL, H. Andrés Lagar Cavilla.

Theres no current solution like this for windows.