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.

lawsuit

[v_1_r_u_5]

I can forsee the day when software vendors join the likes of RIAA in endless lawsuits because people get around software copyright protection by 'sandboxing' installations on virtual pc.

Network?

[eingram]

Maybe I missed it in the review, but is it possible to network the Virtual PC to the actual computer running it? You could do this in VMware and I found it useful time to time.

Hmmmm...

[superdan2k]

Anyone else notice that the row of pictures at the bottom of the page, the old Linux versions of VirtualPC seem to have gone missing with Version 6? Hmmm, and Microsoft bought VPC from Connectix, you say? Hmmm. Imagine my surprise.

The end of Office for Mac?

[elflet]

will this mean the end of Office for Mac?

That's not likely. Office:Mac is already a cash cow for Microsoft; MS had the single largest share of the Macintosh software market in the 90s and probably still does. There's no profit in tossing the mature cross-development system they're using and probably ticking-off the installed base of Mac users.

Really, there'd be no money in it for MS to try and move Office:Mac users to Office on Windows.

What's the application?

[grammaticaster]

I work in a mixed Mac / PC environment. I've found that the better solution to interoperability problems is to simply have computers on both platforms; we never have conversion problems, because the programs that run on PC's only don't output data that needs to be used on the Mac. Besides, for $249, you can almost buy a cheap PC and KVM. i just don't see the point. Who needs Virtual PC?

Big advantages for developers

[BWJones]

Interestingly, I was talking with a Windows developer on the plane about a year ago and he was telling me that using Virtual PC on the Mac for Windows development was actually easier than developing on a dedicated Windows machine because in VirtualPC, Windows is an image that can be readily backed up and restored with a drag and drop should you do something really stupid with the registry or kernel.

Re:It matters that Microsoft bought it.

[binaryDigit]

I think MS would be crazy to kill it off

Why would you think this? Can't imagine that the numbers of users are huge enough for Microsoft to really care. Microsoft bought them for use on x86 systems to add enterprise level partioning to NT server. They don't care about the Mac version (not primarily anyway). Unfortunately we are at their whim here, if they are feeling generous then we _may_ benefit. If however they decide that it's not worth their time, then they can deprive Mac users of a very useful and hard to replace app.

Microsoft

[Hellraisr]

Maybe now they'll actually port it to PC so I can emulate a Mac on my PC. By the way, why hasn't anyone done this yet? If you can emulate PC on Mac, it only makes sense that you could emulate Mac on PC.

Microsoft owns this now

[JudgeFurious]

And so I cannot in good conscience upgrade my existing VPC5. I cannot condone their business practices so they get none of my money. Disney's in the same boat with me.

Besides I just got finished telling the kid (13 year old son) that he could pick from GameCube or Playstation 2 but no X-Box was entering our home so I guess it's time for me to back that up.

It's a shame, I really enjoyed VPC too.

Re:Hmmmm...

[Robotech_Master]

They went missing sooner than that. Try, the day (or maybe the day after) Microsoft bought Connectix. A Mac friend of mine wanted to get ahold of them when he heard that news...and found no sign on their website that they had ever supported Linux.

x86 emulation

[rf0]

Looking over the site it looks like a nice program but can it run other x86 Operating System like Linux or FreeBSD. It would just be nice to know as I'm thinking about a powerbook and would like to know my options. Of course I know OS-X is BSD based but just wondered about other flavours of *NIX

Rus

Re:What I want to know

[runenfool]

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

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.

Mac emulator for PC

[RolandGunslinger]

I should would like to know about this. I'm a Mac lover from way back, but I'm stuck in a Windows world. I'd love the opportuntity to run Mac emulation on Win XP! Anybody know anything about this?

Re:It matters that Microsoft bought it.

[rthille]

The reason that people freak out, and the reason I bought VPC 6 the day I found out Microsoft bought it was that I wanted Virtual PC, not Virtual Windows. I bought it without any windows, and now I can run Linux and Wine which will let me run the 1 piece of Windows software I want to run (Garmin MapSource).

Who thinks that Microsoft will go out of their way to make sure that Microsoft VPC will run 'alternate' operating systems?

I installed Red Hat 8.0 on it last week

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed Red Hat 8.0 on Virtual PC 6 last week. The linux GUI is very slow on my Dual 450MHz, but the command line works great. I can even ssh from the same mac (and from others in my network) to the "Virtual linux", so I just run Virtual PC with linux, minimize it, and use several of my terminals in my mac Terminal.app to log on to it. Its pretty cool.

I am using it to learn RAID on linux, and it is better than a real PC. I can create "virtual disks" and connected/disconnected at will, which is very convenient to simulate RAID configurations, failures, etc (on a real PC, I would have to open the box and connect/disconnec disks to simulate hardware failures...not big deal, but more incovenient).

I have also installed Win98 in it, to run Kazaa...and it is actually usable.

So, all in all, a pretty good product.

PD: I havent tried it yet with Verion 6, but I installed Solaris 6 x86 on Virtual PC 5. It ran OK as well.

Re:It matters that Microsoft bought it.

[Dephex Twin]

They don't care about the Mac version (not primarily anyway). Unfortunately we are at their whim here, if they are feeling generous then we _may_ benefit. If however they decide that it's not worth their time, then they can deprive Mac users of a very useful and hard to replace app.

I don't see why they are being generous to keep it going. I would imagine that significant majority of the copies of VPC that are sold are the ones that are bundled with Windows. Microsoft isn't a hardware company, so to them, this is as good as the person owning an x86 box.

In my opinion, MS would see it like: "we could keep this app going, and keep selling Windows and other MS products to Mac users, or we could kill it off, add more fuel to the abusive monopoly fire, and *possibly* have some of those VPC users go buy a PC with Windows."

Re:It matters that Microsoft bought it.

[barc0001]

Microsoft won't kill it off. They'll just fire all their Mac Office developers and tell everyone who wants to run future versions of Office on a Mac that all they need to do is buy the Virtual PC, a copy of Windows, and Office for Windows, and then they can have Office on their Mac. After all, why sell only one product to fill someone's need when you can force three down their throat instead?

Re:I was hoping to play more games

[smagoun]

Command & Conquer (and Red Alert) worked quite well in VPC last I tried them on my 7600 w/ 450mhz G4. I used to play the original GTA on that machine back when I had a 266mhz G3, and it was more than playable. This is all under OS 9, however; OS 9 has always provided better performance for VPC than OS X. Give that a shot, you might be surprised at the difference.

Also keep in mind that games aren't a priority for the VPC team, and Connectix has repeatedly said that VPC is not a gaming solution.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

No thanks!

[feldsteins]

I for one don't want VPC to have accelerated 3D video. Follow my logic. VPC gets accelerated video. Game start to be playable on it (not fast, but playable). Mac users start buying Windows games that didn't get ported to Mac OS proper. Game developers start saying "hey, why bother doing an expensive port when we are already selling them the Windows version?"

And that leads to the end of the Mac game market. All you have left is emulation. Like Linux. And for the record, Linux is in quite a corner, too. It's primarily because all Linux people who care about games are dual booting Windows. So developers are asking themselves why they should port to Linux when they're already selling them the Windows version. Answer: they have no reason to.

Re:What's the application?

[Spencerian]

1) Because carrying two computers is impractical if you have a laptop, and PC work is impossible without VPC if you are a mobile Mac.

2) Because transferring data between Macs and PCs, despite Mac OS X, can still be a pain. VPC makes it easy to read files without great pains if you have the software.

3) Because some people need an environment where they can test matters without forking over additional cash.

4) Cables suck. KVMs work, but suck. Multiple keyboards suck. Multiple anything with computers generally suck.

5) VPC is a true clone. Every single copy is identical. It's a perfect environment for general testing. You can't get that from any store-bought or homebrew PC. Each will have slightly different parts.

6) VPC is the best way to connect to Windows resources and applications that are steadfastly Windows-only.

7) Respectfully speaking, most people that use VPC don't do the same things you do.

I use VPC to connect to my company's VPN. Quick, I don't have to expend extra effort or make more room on my desk, and can move documents back and forth as I need to.

Better--I can copy my HD with XP as a disk image and move it around, changing it for use with my home and with a company net; in effect, two instances of XP from a single registration. Try THAT with your single-user copy of XP on a real PC.

Microsoft bought VPC and the other VM technologies because they work. Microsoft is many things, but business-wise they are far from stupid or they wouldn't be a rich company. As for ethics, well...

3D != games

[smagoun]

What about programs that require OpenGL or Direct3D that aren't games? There are plenty of CAD, modelling, visualization, etc packages out there that use 3D graphics but aren't games. Furthermore, many of these programs are low-volume or custom programs that have no chance of being ported to the Mac. Better 3D support in VPC for these programs would do nothing but *help* people.

About the game market....does it really matter if there's a mac game market, if Windows games work just fine? Instead of late/non-existent/half-assed/broken/etc ports, Mac users would be able to run new games right when they came out. I bet they'd even be compatible with their PC counterparts, so people playing (say) Everquest wouldn't have to use Mac-only servers. That would be a *good* thing IMHO.

(FWIW, many games today require so much horsepower that emulation - even with 3D acceleration - simply wouldn't be feasible, so a port would be the only viable option for playing on the Mac anyway. That should keep the Mac game market up + running).

Still missing the two GREAT features

[gerardrj]

1. Getting rid of the Windows desktop all together. I REALLY look forward to the day when VPC can go rootless like an X windows server can and the Windows apps appear directly on the Mac desktop.
In eccessence VPC would be just another code execution path just like CoCoa(yellow box), Carbon and Classic(blue box). Maybe the VPC emulator would be called "bigblue box".
This would eliminate many of the system redundancies of running a fully isolated emulator (like mainatining two system clocks, device configurations, display spaces, etc) and dramatically speed things up.

2. Code optimization and restructuring. There was an app/addition to Windows for Alpha (iX32 I think)that would do this. It would look through all your executable 16/32bit X36 code one the machine and pre-optimize it and create a cache of native code that would run on the 64bit Alpha. Given today's HD space and the Mac's concept of "packages", this daemon on the Mac could periodically scan for new Windows apps, and re-write the core portions of them to run natively on PPC, making system calls in to the appropriate VPC section of OS X.

The article's writer ponders the end of Office for Mac. With these two features, there's a distinct possibility that would become reality. MS would simply bundle the VPC emulation "box" along with the Office installer, or any other software you purchase from them.

Re:Microsoft

[k_187]

Because VPC emulates x86 on PPC, there are a couple of PPC emulators for windows, but the most recent OS they can run is like System 7.6 (maybe 8.1, I'm not sure). They're also ass slow. There's also much more of a market for windows apps on a Mac than Mac apps on windows.

Re:It matters that Microsoft bought it.

[swb]

I wouldn't be surprised if future Mac products were just the windows versions integrated with an application-specific VirtualPC wrapper.

This way they don't even have to make Mac-specific applications at all, just maintain the wrapper.

I don't know how performance-inducing this would be, but it'd save a ton of development time.

Re:My experience with upgrading from VPC5 to VPC6

[Equuleus42]

This is true -- there are some remnants of 16 bit code in WIndows 9x that Virtual PC doesn't handle well. Because NT/XP/2000 is all 32-bit, everything is easily emulated and runs nicely.

A great tool for switchers

[Go Aptran]

It's a pity that Apple didn't buy VPC. If they bundled a barebones version of VPC with OSX, some nervous would-be switchers might be more likely to buy a Mac. I doubt that Microsoft would kill the product, but it's very likely that the next version will "report home" more often with what you do with your Virtual PC. I hope I'm wrong about this.

I bought VPC when I bought my TiBook and found it extremely helpful. I installed Win 98 on it and Office 97 to work with my old ACCESS databases and it worked in a fairly speedy fashion. I also used it to handle various media files that QuickTime couldn't handle.

I LOVE being able to drag a file from my Windows desktop to the Mac OSX desktop and watch the icon change as it crosses "the border" between the two operating systems.

As I've replaced my Windows software with Mac equivalents (which are often improvements) I've used VPC less and less often... lately just to use Kazaa to download music. Before anyone suggests any OSX replacements for Kazaa... I've tried all sorts of Peer-2-Peer clients on the Mac (Lamewire anyone?) and can't find anything that even begins come close!

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

[smagoun]

VPC does indeed take advantage of multiple CPUs, but only to the effect that it pushes some of the threads (disk, graphics) to the other CPU. The emulation core itself is single-threaded (as it has to be; a multithreaded core would be a nightmare to code, if it could be made to work at all). While there's a definite speedup because of the second processor, it's on the order of 5-10% IIRC.

Something else....one of the most important factors in VPC's speed is the size of the host processor's cache. The 1.42ghz machines have a 256k on-chip L2 cache and a 2MB L3 cache. That's pretty big, which benefits VPC. The extra 1MB of cache (compared to my Powerbook) is probably worth a few %.

Even with the second CPU and extra cache, I think that 750-800Mhz is about all you can reasonably expect from the 1.42ghz machines. Of course, I've never tried it so I could be wrong.

Re:Big advantages for developers

[JamieF]

I think he probably started with "I want to / already own a Mac but I have to develop for Windows" and used that to rationalize away the performance penalty.

I guess if he were cross-developing somehow, either by using a cross-compiler or a portable programming environment, that wouldn't be too painful - edit on MacOS, compile on MacOS, test on Windows - but if he was just running Windows full screen and doing all his development in there, he was either being disingenuous or ignorant.

Disingenuous, if he were so bullheaded that he HAD to have a PowerBook just to make himself feel kewl even though he really needed to live in Windows all day. Seriously, buy a freaking $400 used Thinkpad on eBay, stick a big Apple sticker on it, and get over yourself. It doesn't make you more l33t to boot into MacOS X just to boot into fullscreen Win2K immediately afterwards; it makes you a dork.

Or, maybe he was just ignorant, because there are plenty of solutions that give you the same functionality (such as VMWare, Ghost, or GoBack) without requiring a PowerBook (whose price performance just ain't in the same ballpark as an x86 laptop, and never has been) and without having to run everything in emulation (slowing it down even more).

Even better than that...

[thatguywhoiam]

I once read about a guy running a webserver at (I believe) University of Texas. He was running this:

Macintosh G3 -> running BeOS, which was running Sheepshaver, which was running Mac OS 8, which was running Virtual PC, which was running Windows NT 4, which was serving his website.

He figured that it had to crash really fucking hard to go through the wall, so to speak, of 3 different operating systems. Sort of a padded cell for IIS.

Re:Network?

[Dephex Twin]

The short answer is no, it won't do anything horrible at all. The "sudo" at the beginning of the command means you want to execute the command with administrator priveleges, which is required if you want to add anything with ifconfig. "sudo" can be dangerous if you use it recklessly, because it lets you do things that would be off-limits to the normal user. Also, "Respect the privacy of others" refers to the fact that if you use the "sudo" command in a multi-user environment, you would have the privileges to access the data in anyone's home directory.

I don't know how to prove that this particular command is harmless, except to say that it wouldn't have been modded up on Slashdot if it was a troll that was meant to do damage.

Re:Mac emulator for PC

[Nicolay77]

Then may be the new 64 bit processors will be able to emulate the PPC.

AMD could even consider that for a marketing campaign.

Re:Still missing the two GREAT features

[Anonymous Coward]

No it wouldn't be hard. Think about it. Windows uses "explorer.exe" as its shell. If you don't run a shell and you boot up Windows all you get is a blank screen. Ctrl-alt-del still brings up the task manager, and you can start apps from there. Now the way i would see this working is a bit hackish, but certainly possible. After your Windows Start Menu is copied to the dock, you start an app, and that message is sent to a service running on the Windows "box" that automatically spawns that app and returns the window size. Then Virtual PC resizes the "root" to be the same size as the application you just spawned. Alternatively you could have a maximized desktop, but by tracking everywhere where a Windows window was currently located you could make every part of the desktop NOT covered by a window trasparent... and (not sure if OS X lets you do this, but Windows does) dynamically make that part of the application "click-throughable", so instead of your click landing on the window it would transfer through underneath. Yes it's a bit hackish, but it'd certainly be doable. All you need is that service running under Windows that tracks the locations of all the windows and notifies Virtual PC. No big deal - there are plenty of cheesy little applications you can download for Windows that track where all your windows are.