Virtual PC 6 Review

Connectix recently released version 6 of Virtual PC, the standard for emulating Windows on a Mac. With version 5, the main feature was Mac OS X compatibility. With version 6, the focus is on better performance and Mac integration.

Now -- and this is the honest-to-goodness truth -- I have not seen an actual computer (only images on TV or in magazines) running native Windows in months. For the whole of 2003. I live a very good life. And I don't want to ruin it by running Windows on my Mac unless I have a need to.

My Windows needs are few. I am a perl developer; I work on perl and release perl software. Occasionally, I want to test on Windows. Further, I am a Slash developer, and sometimes our users complain about certain bugs that only show up on certain browsers, so I want to test that on Windows too. And every once in awhile, there is some software I need that is Windows-only.

All of these needs are rare, but when I need them, I need them. Virtual PC has always been helpful to me for these purposes in the past, though it's been slow. So on to version 6.

The first thing I did was upgrade from version 5, and just play around. Everything is noticeably faster. Viewing multimedia is nicer, opening apps is quicker, moving around the filesystem is zippier (I am running out of adjectives here, bear with me).

I was overdue on some updates, so I ran the Windows Update app. They downloaded and installed much more quickly, though I still prefer to download via Mac OS X and drag the files over to Windows.

I updated Cygwin and ActiveState's Perl Development Kit and Komodo, which I use occasionally; they work fine, but are still too slow to be bearable for everyday use, but I would not want to use Windows for everyday use, so it's all good.

Now, on to the new features. Version 6 has a more refined interface for defining preferences and organizing multiple guest PCs (I've got Windows 95 and Windows 2000). You can now mount those PC disk images, which is nice, but only when the PC is shut down. Since I leave the PCs running all the time, to make startup faster (using the Save State feature), I never have much opportunity to mount the disk images. Although, when I did try to mount the Windows 95 PC (more than once), it crashed. It worked fine for the Windows 2000 image.

Another new step toward integration is the addition of some items for the Mac OS X Dock: a Start menu application, and the ability to place Windows applications in the Dock. The Start menu application is nifty; you get the Start menu from your Windows PC, but in the Dock instead. It's more responsive and looks better. The Windows applications in the Dock seems slightly less useful; clicking on them does not bring the application to the front, it only launches it (which I'd just as soon do from the Start menu).

Supposedly, there are some significant improvements to printing, including automatically detecting USB printers. My USB printer, however, is connected via Mac OS X printer sharing on another Mac, and so I can't print to it directly from Windows (at least, not that I could figure out). Instead, I need to print through the host Mac OS X from the Windows OS. Sounds simple enough, right?

To do this, I still needed to use the right driver for the printer, and it wasn't included with Windows, so I needed to install it. I downloaded the drivers from Canon's web site with a Mac browser, and just copied them to the Windows desktop. When I ran the installer, Windows reported an "access violation". Thinking that perhaps the file was not downloaded properly, I tried downloading it via Windows instead. It takes longer, but maybe it will work. But no, I got the same error. It's good to know that Virtual PC maintains the Windows Experience, that these problems weren't Virtual PC's fault.

I pulled out the CD that came with the printer and installed the (somewhat out of date) drivers from there; this time, it worked fine. But then, when I tried to print, and the Virtual PC app hung on "Printing page number: 1", with a spinning pinwheel and an unmoving progress bar. Force Quit was my only way out. I tried several times, as I did with mounting the Windows 95 image, and each time, it hung. When I would start Virtual PC again, I'd get the Print dialog, and try to print again, and it would hang. At least it's consistent.

I finally decided to give up on printing this way, and did direct printing. I plugged my printer directly into the computer, told Virtual PC to use that USB device for Windows, and Windows detected it automatically and set it up for me. After that, printing worked fine.

But, in fairness, none of these problems are related to my normal uses of Virtual PC, and if I really needed to accomplish the tasks of printing or mounting I'd probably be able to figure it out. I just didn't care enough, so I dropped it and moved on to more interesting things.

I have a Kyocera QCP 3035 cell phone. I am going to be on the road some this summer, so I wanted to use it as a modem for my PowerBook G4/867. I got the cable and the Mac OS X modem drivers and scripts (I had to email tech support to get them), and it works fine as a modem, but I also wanted to use the cable to upload contacts and ringers. The problem is, the Kyocera software is Windows-only. Virtual PC to the rescue?

I installed the Windows drivers and software and plugged in the cable. It took me a couple tries to figure out that I needed to select the cable in Virtual PC's Serial Ports preferences (assigned it to COM1), but when I did, the software recognized the phone and everything just worked. I uploaded ringers, I controlled the phone with the software. So now for the contacts.

I converted my contacts from the Mac OS X Address Book vCard export to a CSV file the Kyocera software could read. I dragged the file from the Mac OS X desktop to the Windows desktop. I imported the file into the Kyocera software and synched it with the phone. It worked. There's not much else to say here, which is about the highest praise I could heap on the test.

I was also thinking about using some Windows software I have to control my motorized Meade telescope; but frankly, if I am going to be investing the time into getting the cable and setting it all up to use software like that, I'd rather spend the extra money to get the Mac version of the software. It'd be much better to use.

All in all, Virtual PC does what -- for me -- it should. I can run perl and various web browsers for testing; I can communicate with serial devices; I can even play Windows-only multimedia files.

For completeness, I was going to play around with Bochs, but after reading various reader reviews bemoaning poor performance, and not being able to find straightforward instructions, I gave up.

You may recall, gentle reader, that Microsoft has purchased Virtual PC from Connectix. Does that mean people should invest more into Bochs, or look for alternate solutions? Will Virtual PC mean the end of Office for Mac? I don't really know; but as I am not a Windows user, I don't really care, as long as I can keep using the very few Windows products I need.

Hmm

[Gortbusters.org]

For all the PHP developers, the good ole Zend Studio [zend.com] is available on Mac OSX. If only NuSphere's PHPed [nusphere.com] was.

Hmm, what else keeps me a windows box next to my linux box. Perhaps it's DAOC, management of my Clie. The MS office support in OSX is tempting though!

Re:Network?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it is. You can set it up as NAT'd behind the system it's running on, or as a seperate IP address.

Re:lawsuit

[binaryDigit]

when software vendors join the likes of RIAA in endless lawsuits

Software vendors already have the BSA to chase down evil doers.

people get around software copyright protection by 'sandboxing' installations on virtual pc.

I don't understand how using virtual pc helps people "get around" copyright protection? If it's an enduser app, then I doubt they care if you are silly enough to try to run two copies of Photoshop in two different VirtualPC sessions (ouch). The only scenerio I can see is if you're running something like IIS where it _may_ have language that says you can run one copy per cpu, so you run 5 copies in 5 virtual pc sessions to get around the CAL limits, but who'ed be insane enough to do this? I would imagine the bigger issue might be running this or VMWare and doing the above. But then again, the software licenses might already preclude this, so it may be a moot issue.

In any case, could you expand on what you had in mind here?

Re:Network?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. There are two main network setups. Shared IP, and Virtual Switch. Using Virtual Switch you can do this.

I was hoping to play more games

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Very oldies like Civilization run too fast but anything recent is far too slow. AOE2, for example, crawls on a 550MHz PowerBook and an oldie like the origonal Command and Conquer are too slow to be playable. You have to go back as far as Warfract (I!) or Settlers II to find a real time graphics game that plays fine. Microprose's Magic the Gathering works well however. Of course there's no problem running the original Infocom adventure games for that real retro experience. I found the original Tomb Raider almost tolerable. Surprisingly I found the old PC Wolfenstein a bit choppy on v5 but I'll try v6 some time soon. I tried the recent freebie GTA. It actually runs but too slow to be fun. On a 1GHz PowerBook it may actually be playable.

All in all it's a fine app. Integration of individual Windows apps into the dock is cool.

BTW I originally bought v5 with PC-DOC and installed my own Windows 98 (legally I might add).

I've also tried running every OS I could get my hands on. Pretty well everything from Plan 9 to Menuet runs. The only thing that failed was Darwin - that was on v5.

Re:What's the application?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a mac powerbook. You saying I should carry two notebooks?

There ARE valid useful applications.

My experience with upgrading from VPC5 to VPC6

[heldlikesound]

I run OSX 10.2.4 on a 700 mHz iBook with 384MB of RAM. Not, a "loaded" machine at all, but quick enough for web dev. and some light multi-media work. I ran VPC with Win 98, and the results were pretty pathetic, I'd click on a window to move it and would have to wait five seconds for the system to even respond, it was basically unusable.

Enter VPC6. I upgraded to VPC6 and installed Win 2000 Pro, (which has always been the best of the worst in my opinion), and was pleasantly suprised to find it runs pretty smoothly, apps are actually useful now, I use Nokia's WAP development toolkit, and while it's not setting speed records on my computer, it works for what I need it to do.

So, all of you familar with the scientific method are now asking, "So was it the upgrade of the OS or VPC that made the speed in increase?" Well, I didn't do any controlled experiments, but it feels like it was the upgrade. Your unpleasant, but neccesary results may vary.

On a related note, Microsofts purchase of Virtual PC was a predictably smart and evil business move. Does anyone actually believe that Microsoft, will make this a better program? I'm glad that VPC6 was a relatively nice upgrade, I don't expect to see another useful emulator until Bochs on OSX devaporizes...

Re:Network?

[Dephex Twin]

Yes, but most people don't seem to know how to do it. Connectix supports using MS Loopback Adapter for the Windows version of Virtual PC, but for some reason doesn't have a Mac equivalent.

You can make your own by mapping some IP (say, 192.168.111.1) to 127.0.0.1. Just do this in the terminal:

sudo ifconfig lo0 alias 192.168.111.1

Then you add this to the ethernet port as well:

sudo ifconfig en0 alias 192.168.111.1

Now anytime VPC tries to get to that IP address, it will be like going to localhost.

Now if you just set the Windows side to a static IP like 192.168.111.2 with the gateway 192.168.111.1, the two machines can talk, even if you are not hooked up to any network.

Oh, and make sure you set the Windows side to "Virtual Switch" in VPC... the default is "Shared Networking".

(To get rid of those customizations, just execute this command: sudo ifconfig lo0 -alias 192.168.111.1, and then the same with with en0).

Re:What I want to know - We need benchmarks!

[runenfool]

Its very very difficult to directly compare performance between emulated and real systems. You can have one app that runs like its running on a P3-500, and another that runs like its on a 486. Its just the nature of emulation, it does some things better than others.

Anything requiring extensive disk access will tend to be slow, as well as anything video intensive. In my experience anyway.

If you are talking about buying a new Mac, and the Windows (obviously the Linux stuff has probably been ported to some degree) software you have isn't games or anything too intense, it should probably run great on a Powermac.

Re:Mac emulator for PC

[FueledByRamen]

The main reason that I know of, preventing PPC on X86 emulation, is that PPC has so many more registers than X86. Most of them would have to be mapped to memory, instead of using on-CPU registers. This would slow down any program using lots of registers (all of them?) by a HUGE amount.

Re:My experience with upgrading from VPC5 to VPC6

[mkelley]

On version 5, there were issues with the 9x code that made it slower than a VPC with NT4. I dropped 98 on VPC and used NT4 sp6 instead. Same browsers, but it ran about 30% faster.

98 under version 6 does seem flaster, while Nt screams.

Re:Big advantages for developers

[Lynn Benfield]

I highly doubt they were using the Mac version for development - they were much more likely to be using the Windows version of VPC.

This will give you near-native speed since the instruction set doesn't need to be interpreted, but you can still have multiple virtual machines (which definitely makes life easier: particularly for QA, where you can run multiple versions of Windows for testing and just fetch a fresh disk image when things get broken).

This whole virtual-x86-machine-on-x86 is exactly why MS bought them: the fact that there's a Mac version was pretty incidental to them I imagine - what they're really after is the virtual server market.

Printing

[Sho0tyz]

It seems like the reviewer made it too difficult for himself. Why not just choose the "print to file" option in Windows and drag the postscript file over to the Mac disk to print it. It takes a few extra seconds, but surely it's easier than moving the printer around.

Clie program for Mac OS X

[gavbaa]

Check out Missing Sync (you can find a link to it on the Sony Clie website). According to my office friend who just got it for his Clie, it's the greatest sync program since sliced bread, and integrates with all the tasty Mac apps.

Re:What I want to know - We need benchmarks!

[smagoun]

In my experience, VPC on a 1ghz powerbook runs at about the same speed as a 500mhz PIII with really slow disk and graphics subsystems. Unfortunately the disk + graphics systems put a damper on overall performance. The CPU emulation itself is quite fast, however. Depending on exactly what you're doing, it ranges from about .4x to .75x the speed of host's processor. On one of the new 1.42ghz towers, I'd expect to see CPU performance roughly equal to a 750mhz PIII.

useful for tech support

[TechStuff.ca]

VirtualPC is very useful in a HelpDesk environment. You can have multiple versions of Windows (and other OSes) running at once, to easily support people on multiple platforms without rebooting your own machine.

You can have one environment in which a particular Windows Update patch or security update has been installed, and another that hasn't, and easily switch between them.

You can even set up environments with specific software combinations. ("So, you're running WordPerfect 11 with Internet Explorer 5.5 and QuickTime 6? Just a sec. Okay, let's see if we can duplicate that error...")

VPC lets you test viruses, spyware and other dangerous software without risk. You just make a backup of the virtual drive before trying something risky, in case you need to go back to the previous version.

VPC isn't for everyone, but it's very useful for some.

Sandy

Re:Microsoft

[truenoir]

There are Mac emulators for PC. Basilisk for one. They actually work pretty well, however, the biggest things are that 1.) You can't emulate a PPC and 2.) You need a Mac ROM file (which to legally have means you probably need to go buy a used Mac for $5 anyway).

This pretty much limits you to 8.x MacOS levels, however, if you want to run some older Mac games or whatnot, it should be good enough. System 7.5.5 is available for free from Apple though, which makes it a solid choice for such a task.

Re:The great mac irony

[truenoir]

You dissin' the Media Access Control addresses? We need those to keep packets goin' where they ought. Or perhaps you don't realize that Mac is short for Macintosh, and so isn't all caps? ^_^

Re:What I want to know - We need benchmarks!

[jaoswald]

Actually, I would think that disk access tends to *equalize* emulators with real hardware. After all, your disk access is probably limited by disk latency and bandwidth, and the hard disk on your emulating machine shouldn't be that much slower than the real thing. Furthermore, the data from the hard disk is not going to need much translation between platforms.

What would kill speed is a task where the real processor to be able to execute with code and data both in cache. The emulated processor has to fit the relevant emulator code, emulated processor state, JIT-compiled emulated code, and the program data all in the host machine cache to have any chance at all of keeping up. [Note that Connectix requires L3 cache on the Mac to get the advertised speed improvements.] Even then, the inner loop of JIT-compiled code is probably not as optimized as an inner loop that makes heavy use of processor-specific quirks.

Video speed depends on how well the emulator maps the video calls to hardware on the emulating machine. Virtual PC does not do that for 3D.

Re:What I want to know

[A_Non_Moose]

Connectix/Microsoft can't readd video card support because of endian issues.

Nvidia about the time they started making Mac video cards said that adding endian support is *trivial*.
Specifically they were talking about BI-endian support.

Kind of shot ATI in the foot (and themselves) when PC video cards sell for 70 bucks and the Mac equivalent sells for 300 bucks.

The reason the early voodoo cards were supported is because they were 3d only. If another 3d only card came on the market it could be done.


Uhh, not quite...the real reason was that the voodoo2 could be flashed to add the endian support for macs...irony struck when it could only be done on a PC. {chuckle}
Now, IIRC, there is a Mac flash program for 3dfx cards and for Nvidia/ATI cards.
Takes some digging to find, on occasion.
.

real virtual pc software

[Sarin]

I use bochs [sourceforge.net] on my mac which runs linux.
It emulates the x86 processor and hardware so you can not only run windows but also other x86 operating systems and it's free. Here are some screenshots [sourceforge.net] .
It's not that fast on my 400mhz powerbook though. But it works fluently.

I love VPC6

[nettdata]

I actually went out and bought version 5. While it WORKED, I was somewhat disappointed in it's performace (specifically, the lack thereof). The mouse was SLOW, disk access was REALLY slow (a samba share to the OS X box was the best way to achieve reasonable disk access), etc. It was PAINFULL.

Enter the VPC 6 upgrade.

WOW.

Let me say that again...

WOW!

Now, to put it into perspective, I have a TiBook 800 with a Gig of RAM. I'm CTO of a software development company (Intellinger) [intellinger.com], and we develop performance monitoring software. Our entire shop uses OSX for our development (Java). We need to test and demo our product on/with Win32 OS's.

We use VPC for demos as well as testing on different platforms.

VPC6 boots faster on my TiBook than it does on my 2 year old Toshiba Satelite Pro. The mouse is THERE, if you know what I mean... no more "VNC" like responses, and the local folder sharing RULES.

I personally use it for a number of things...

Demos: We pull into a (potential) client site with our OSX laptops, launch our app on OSX, and then fire up VPC with the appropriate Win32 or Linux OS, and proceed to run our app against it. VPC allows the Win32/Linux session to look (over the network) like a totally separate machine. (VPC allows NAT-like network access or a totally independent IP address/access). The clients are totally amazed, and for the most part we have to keep them focused on our app and "stop asking questions about VPC!". The resounding feedback from the techies we present to is "wow... that's COOL! What are you selling again?".

Testing: We have a dual processor OSX box, running VPC, with 23 separate installations of different Win32 and Linux installs in various stages of configurations. We've found that this works amazingly well in testing installation, configuration, and operation issues. We can duplicate an entire configuration, do what we want with it, and then blow it away when we're done. Disposable installs. Way cool.

Visio: Omnigraffle is a great program for OSX, but it still is lacking the serious "stencil" support that Visio has when it comes to designing co-lo racks, etc. As well, most of the network techs I know still use Visio for the most part, so I need to be able to exchange Visio docs with them. I run Visio in VPC when I have to, and it feels "natural", native, whatever you want to call it. Awesome response.

Adobe Acrobat: Acrobat support SUCKS for OSX. (Adobe, you listening? Get your shit together!). I do a lot of reports in Word, and the PDFMaker macro in the Win32 version of Acrobat is amazing... it creates a really nicely formatted PDF document with the nice bookmarks, etc. That just doesn't exist in the OSX world. (If someone knows how to do this, PLEASE let me know!). So, to get around this, I have acrobat/Word installed on VPC, so when I have to generate the final docs, I use it to generate the output.

TOAD: I do a lot of Oracle development, and have yet to find a replacement for TOAD. It doesn't run in OSX. But it runs VERY well in VPC. The only issue is trying to find a minimal sql*net client install without installing / unzipping a DB install. Joy. That being said, I can launch VPC with Win98, create a port-forwarded SSH session to a remote Oracle box, and do anything I have to with TOAD. For that matter, I can also use TOAD in VPC to develop against the Oracle 9i DB running in OSX on the same box.

Those are just some of my experiences, and that's not to say that everything is golden...

There are the occasional freezes, usually the result of me using LiteSwitch X to switch between apps too quickly while it's working away on something, and there are some "weird" errors that pop up (every time I close TOAD, for instance, I always get a "illegal operation" error pop up). But you know, that's the minority of the time... the exception rather than the rule.

I highly recommend VPC6 for that "last mile" when moving from Win32 to OSX.

VPC speed

[iotaborg]

In my experience, VPC has some interesting speed issues. I'm on a G4 Dual 1250, with VPC 6 with Win2000. In my experience, VPC can emualte x86 basic instructions very fast, for example running an RC5 test will give me ~3MKeys/s in VPC, which is very comparable to current low end PCs (in OS X I get 25+MKeys/s ;) ).

The problem, however, is in the graphics. Graphics are simply too slow, and it doesn't have good DirectX support either. It emulates an S3 graphics card... I hope Microsoft fixes this issue in the next verion of VPC, because processor emulation is fast, UI and graphics are slow.

Re:PC-on-a-PCI-card for Macs

[Jhan]

PC prices are so cheap nowdays, that I'm wondering how come no company has come up with a "PC on a PCI card" which you can drop into a mac, and use as a normal PC instead of emulating it...

Like this (search for Houdini) [faqs.org]? There were also (as you mention) the various Janus Bridgeboards for the Amigas. The fastest was a '486dx66, I think. There was even a A500 '286 card that connected to the memory expansion slot (!) at the bottom of the computer. With glorious Herkules graphics.

In other words, it has been tried. These card all had some things in common:

• Being at least one processor generation behind the PC.
• Costing about the same as an equivalent PC, despite being only glorified motherboards.

This concept could work, but only when there is a high volume PC motherboard form factor that's smaller than a PCI (or whatever we're using then) card. Then you can make a PCI-shaped 'glue' kit that plugs into the motherboards various connectors and fits into a PCI slot in another system.

Re:I don't get it. Why an emulator?

[gerardrj]

The attraction is that an emulator doesn't add any more cables to my already over-cabled home office.
The emulator starts up and is running windows in less than 10 seconds from when I double-click the app when I leave the disk image in a "save state" mode.
A real machine takes up physical space and makes more noise and heat than my software emulator.
Without any extra logins or netwokr links, I can drag an drop files across the emulator and Mac desktops.

Why would I want all that hassle of a real machine when I would fire it up only a few times a year? But then again, it would be another system on which to run Seti at Home.

Re:Network?

[Battal Boy]

Well, if you're building a site that has ASP and you want to test how it works/looks on a Mac, this local connection is quite handy. Say you have Win2K running IIS on VPC, you can test your site by connecting to IIS as if it was just another server on the Internet... Keen, innit? ;-)

It Won't -- Because It Shouldn't

[UNIBLAB_PowerPC]

I haven't used anything beyond VPC 4.x in "Classic" Mac OS, but you shouldn't ever need something like Partition Magic -- VPC stores all of the Windows OS, Windows apps, and Windows files in a single Mac file. Regarding this single file, you have two options: either allow the file(partition) to grow as necessary, or set it to a fixed amount (which I'd imagine VPC allocates and squats on said drive space).

I'd be curious if they used the package format in Mac OS X to make each Windows "partion" appear to be a single file while leaving the option of browsing the contents, but that's another story.

And you can also connect to Mac folders as virtual network shares/drives, so keeping common files from hogging space on your Windows partition(s) is a snap.

Re:Games.

[ymgve]

VirtualPC doesn't support 3D acceleration, so that rules out most new games. Older games will probably work better, but from what I've seen on the PC version, the VGA emulation seems to be the slowest part of the whole emulator. So your best bet is non-accelerated Windows games that are quite a bit old..

Re:Microsoft

[WheresMyDingo]

The best Mac emulator for PC I know of is Basilisk II [uni-mainz.de]

It emulates 68k code though, not PPC, so you are stuck with MacOS 8.1 max, but on a fast PC you can run 68k code faster than any Motorola 68k processor ever did! You will need the ROM from a Quadra 650 (68040) for best results.

I was using it to run REALbasic REALbasic [realbasic.com] 3.5.2 -- the last 68k version. REALbasic can create Windows apps, but you have to run the IDE on the Mac-- that is, until version 5 which just came out but which you have to pay for all over again so I probably won't get it.

One cool thing is to access a Mac network from the PC-- the good old chooser running on Windows!

Re:It matters that Microsoft bought it.

[Moofie]

They did this, and called it (if I remember correctly) MS Office 4.0.2. (Basically Word 6 and Excel 5) Mac users failed to buy it in droves.

Mostly because it was incredibly ugly, and worked just like the stupid Windows version that they bought a Mac to not have to use in the first place.

Keeping PDF bookmarks

[descubes]

I use Ghostscript's 'ps2pdf' program to generate PDF files. It does keep bookmarks, at least when printing from FrameMaker (I don't use Word too much, but that's probably the same thing).

So here is what I do (not quite as easy as you'd like, but it works):
- First, install ghostscript or some package with ps2pdf. Left as an exercise for the reader.
- Second, print to a postscript file, generate PDF hints
- Third, invoke ps2pdf on the generated PS file.
You generally want to include all the required fonts in the document, ps2pdf doesn't seem too good at finding fonts by itself.

ps2pdf also solved another problem for me, namely printing from Classic applications when my printer's driver exists only for OSX - Solution: print to PS, convert to PDF, print the PDF from OSX.

Hope this helps...