Next Version of Virtual PC for Mac to Suck Less 86
Anomalous Coward writes "According to Apple Insider, it seems that the next version of Virtual PC for Mac will at long last have native support for decent graphics cards. Microsoft's XBox development team is developing this shiny new feature. Macs equipped with ATi cards will be able to emulate an original Radeon, while Macs with nVidia cards will be able to emulate a Geforce 3. Since the XBox uses a graphics core based on the Geforce 3, this may explain how Microsoft plans to include backward compatibility for the XBox in the XBox2."
vpc is slow (Score:4, Informative)
When I run xp pro on vpc on a mac( for some physicians who have it here and have to use it for hospital applications ), it takes FOREVER even to bring up internet explorer on a brand new powerbook g4.
I'm not sure why MS even ships xp with vpc. It seems like something that still works with most stuff, like Windows 98, would be better because it's real cpu requirements are MUCH lower.
I don't think the video card issues are the real problem. MS needs to just release a version of windows for the mac that can run as a
Chris
Re:vpc is slow (Score:1)
Re:vpc is slow (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:vpc is slow (Score:5, Insightful)
And the thought of Microsoft releasing "a version of windows for the mac that runs as a
Re:vpc is slow (Score:4, Informative)
However, it may be that VPC has seen its last days anyway if this stuff has any merit. Let's hope.
From the press release:
"Los Gatos, Calif. - September 13, 2004 - Transitive Corporation, the leading provider of software that enables transportability of applications across multiple processor and operating system pairs, today launched its QuickTransit(TM) product line, a family of products that allows software applications compiled for one processor and operating system to run on another processor and operating system without any source code or binary changes. The company's breakthrough hardware virtualization technology is unique because it provides 100% functionality, transparent interactive and graphics performance, near-native computational performance, and allows virtually any processor/operating system pair to be supported.
The first products available in the QuickTransit(TM) product line are:
QuickTransit for Itanium®: with support for MIPS®, POWER(TM)/PowerPC®, x86, and mainframe binaries
QuickTransit for Opteron®: with support for MIPS, POWER/PowerPC, and mainframe binaries
QuickTransit for x86: with support for MIPS, POWER/PowerPC and mainframe binaries
QuickTransit for POWER/PowerPC: with support for MIPS, x86, and mainframe binaries"
It's also interesting to note that they are saying:
"Transitive has signed agreements with six of the world's largest computer OEMs to date."
Find out more at:
http://www.transitive.com/index.htm [transitive.com]
Re:vpc is slow (Score:1)
If you really need to run software designed for a diff arch, get that machine and fire up VNC.
The only way I could see someone running PPC on X86 or vice-versa, would be to have a self-contained PCI board with the offending processor and an assortment of host-emulating devices.. including a framebuffer and bus bridge. Feasible, and probably worth big bucks if done correctly, but a major pain in the ass no less. You'd also probably need some sort of dedicated storage and memory for
Re:vpc is slow (Score:2)
Re:vpc is slow (Score:2)
seriously, he posts on every damn discussion on slashdot nowadays.
Re:vpc is slow (Score:4, Insightful)
What do you think /System/Library/CoreServices/Classic Startup.app is doing?
I disagree completely. (Score:3, Informative)
I run VPC on my G4 733 Tower with a Win98 image and on my iBook G3 900 without any slowdowns whatsoever, in fact I run the first Baldur's Gate on my iBook. However I've got plenty of PCs so I don't use it that often, only when checking webpage compatability in IE when I'm working on a Mac.
The only product I've found superior on a PC instead of the Mac version (Office is sooooo much better on the Mac) is SPSS. That is the biggest piece of shit software I've
Re:I disagree completely. (Score:5, Funny)
System requirements for Baldur's Gate:
Pentium 166
16 Megs of ram
DirectX 3.0
Recommended:
Pentium 200
32 Megs of ram
DirectX 5.0
Not exactly a glowing portrayal of VPC.
Re:vpc is slow - but it *was* fast :( (Score:5, Interesting)
Virtual PC on Mac OS 9 is an order of magnitude faster on even a 400 MHZ G4 under Mac OS Classic than Virtual PC is on a 1.5 Ghz G4 under OS X. Virtual PC (and OS X) are in need of significant optimising.
I would point out though that the biggest significant factor is RAM. You need to assign the Virtual PC 256 MB of RAM and you want to have 1 GB of RAM in your system. I have 1 GB of RAM in my current PowerBook - without 1 GB of physical RAM and without assigning 256 MB for the Virtual PC itself Windows XP in Virtual PC is fairly unusable.
Windows 98 used to be particularly fast with Virtual PC and the recommended OS. Sadly, something in the switch to Mac OS X made Windows 98 become much slower than Win 2K + under VPC in OS X and that was never addressed. Bascially the situation currently sucks. Now you need 1 GB of RAM, and at it's best it's still 1/4 the speed of VPC on Mac OS Classic.
I think that graphics card emulation is important though. It *really* speeds up the perception and responsiveness of the system, because it lowers the CPU load on your Mac, leaving it free to consentrate on the actual x86 emulation. For the lucky few that had 3D cards back when Virtual PC 3.0 (which *did* have hardware pass through support) you could play Quake at full speed inside Virtual PC.
Re:vpc is slow - but it *was* fast :( (Score:5, Interesting)
For example, VPC would be a -lot- faster if instead of allocating a ton of RAM to VPC, you instead had a VM plug-in for Windows that caused it to ask the emulator (through a trap of some kind) to request RAM from the Mac OS X VM system.
Similarly, if more games and stuff used OpenGL instead of DirectX, they could make OpenGL calls pass straight through to Mac OS X's implementation in much the same way that X11 OpenGL apps do. To some extent, the same tricks could be done with DirectX, I think. That should be a much cleaner solution than trying to mimic a much more limited graphics card.
And I'm surprised VPC (last I checked) doesn't save its working set translations to a cache file that persists across launches. VPC does do working set detection and cached recompilation during execution, right?
Re:vpc is slow - but it *was* fast :( (Score:3, Informative)
Hmm that seems like a good idea as far as VM handling goes and I think I've heard it come up before, I think they are probably going to just rely on people throwing physical RAM at the problem for now.
On the issue of being optimised for Windows, I could swear that Virtual
Re:vpc is slow - but it *was* fast :( (Score:2)
From a hardware perspective, Mac graphic cards should behave exactly as their PC counterparts do. PCI/AGP devices always have the same endianness on Macs and PCs because PCI is a natively little-endian bus. See Writing PCI Drivers [apple.com], and in particular, the section on endianness and addressing. At the very least, it's good for a migraine. :-)
The PCI/A
Not Quite (Score:1)
That's BS.
I have used VPC a lot under OS 9 and OS X on my Powerbook (800 Mhz G4). Yes it is faster under 9, but the difference is nowhere near an order of magnitude. And I would bet you good money that a 400 Mhz machine will not run it faster than a 1.5 Ghz machine under ANY OS.
Re:Not Quite (Score:2)
You can say 'BS" all you like but I have run it under both and there is a *vast* difference between Windows 98 on my 400 Mhz G4 than Windows 98 (or 2000, or XP) on Mac OS X classic on my 1.5 Ghz G4.
The difference is staggering. But then both my systems where optimised for performance - lots of RAM in both and lots of RAM dedicated to the Virtual PC (and
Re:Not Quite (Score:1)
Re:vpc is slow (Score:1)
I don't think that this is a problem with the mac in general, but rather a problem of emulating another architecture in software on the cpu that is not designed to run those instructions.
Java seems to do okay.
Re:vpc is slow (Score:2)
Re:vpc is slow (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:vpc is slow (Score:1)
Re:vpc is slow (Score:1)
Re:vpc is slow (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that this [opendarwin.org]
nick
Re:vpc is slow (Score:1)
It currently works, and it comes in a nice sexy Mac OS X package format sutible for slack jawed yokels to install. Yay! \o/
Re:vpc is slow (Score:5, Interesting)
This sounds a little like what Apple did during the 68k/PPC transition. Apple wrote an emulation system that allowed Apple to port parts of the OS to PPC at their leisure, while the rest of the OS and legacy apps ran through the emulator. My understanding was that an early PC-on-Mac emulation package (SoftWindows?) tried to do something similar.
The problem with this approach is, since the legacy code is naive about the real hardware it is running on, all the "intelligence" of the coexistence of the two ISAs must be handled in the native code. Early Mac OS's used a "Mixed Mode Manager" as well as a weird "Universal Procedure Pointer" structure to handle context switches and memory accesses. This foundation hung around even after the OS and all current apps were ported to PPC completely, adding unneeded cruft to OS 9. They were finally removed during the transition to OS X and Carbon.
If Microsoft were to try this, VPC users would only get improvements at maybe the UI level, since there is a snowball's chance in Hell that any of the Windows developers would go through the same experience that Mac developers did to support "fat" binaries. This limits speed improvement, since much hardcore processing functionality would still be in x86-land and would require context switches between PPC and x86 on a regular basis.
Re:vpc is slow (Score:2)
I'd hope not at all, while I've been a PC user for years, if I ever went back to a Mac, there are a few old programs (Mostly older games, with the odd handy utility) that I'd probably want to keep using.
Re:vpc is slow (Score:2)
Re:vpc is slow (Score:2)
It doesn't. OSX runs ClassicStartup.app, which is a Mac equivalent to WINE. Classic runs OS9, which has 68k emulation, which runs the app.
Re:vpc is slow (Score:5, Insightful)
While you're not wrong, just to clarify: The Mixed Mode Manager came in with System 7.2, which was not really an "early" mac OS - sort of middling. UPPs weren't "weird", they were in fact a very elegant and inspired piece of design - for 68K code, UPPs were just pointers, plain and simple. So existing 68K binaries still worked. But for PowerPC code, they became a small transparent wrapper to a trap mechanism that determined whether the caller required the use of the 68K emulator, and if so, started it up. The result was that code of either flavour "just worked". It has been noted that this is possibly the only time that a dual ISA has ever been successfully implemented without having a separate emulation "box" on the system. The great thing was that as a programmer, if you just used the UPP macros, there was nothing special you had to do to support this dual architecture - 68k and PPC code could be mixed more or less freely. Neat.
Re:vpc is slow (Score:5, Interesting)
You deserve a mod-up, but since I don't have points, I'll just reply instead to draw attention...
The Mixed Mode Manager came in with System 7.2, which was not really an "early" mac OS - sort of middling.
7.1.2, IIRC. The time it took Apple to reach that from the 128k was about 6-7 years, while the time it took Apple to reach end of the Classic line was closer to ten. From most user's standpoint, System 7 was an "early" Mac OS. (My first Mac ran 7.0.1, but could run 6.0.5, to give an idea of my history here.) Apple quickly gunned through 7 "major" revs (all released for free!) early on, then slowed to only 3-4 revs late in the OS life cycle.
It's interesting, but there is a parallel here with OS X. Apple quickly gunned through 4 major revs (with the first being free), but has announced that Tiger will slow the curve down. I wouldn't be surprised that either Tiger or 10.5 will go down in history as the "System 7" of the OS X legacy.
UPPs weren't "weird", they were in fact a very elegant and inspired piece of design
To most PC developers, "elegant" is "weird." (-;
The notion that a "pointer" wasn't implemented as an memory address, but as a data structure, was a strange thing at that time. (Now-a-days, we just call them "references" and no longer treat memory addresses as something "safe" to work with.) Despite having an easier to grok assembler language, this complication made it harder to write low-level code on the Mac, cementing the need to use a language like C to write all Mac software afterwards. Also, the heavy dependacy on macros in the "Universal Interfaces" to hide UPPs made continued support for Pascal as a application development language difficult.
Re:vpc is slow (Score:2, Informative)
- Right-click on the desktop, choose Properties, choose Themes, and go with the Windows classic desktop. Just giving it a solid blue desktop (part of the theme) seems to speed things up a lot.
- Right click on My Computer and so
Re:vpc is slow (Score:2)
Though I can't say absolutely conclusively since I have only one Mac, and didn't do measurements (and only a fool would trust a benchmarking program in an emulator). I found NT4 to be the most responsive.
There seems to be a problem with running DOS programs in VPC (yes, with DOS VPC additions) that causes VPC to eat 100% CPU even when the emulated CPU is doing very little. I guess it's hard to tell when DOS applic
Re:vpc is slow (Score:5, Interesting)
It's the disk access in XP that's a pig. If you tweak the VPC settings, you can get pretty decent performance out of XP, except where it hits the disk to load programs and swap, then it slows to a pig crawl. Maybe there's some disk features you can tweak in XP to speed up disk access.
I've tweaked my VPC and actually get pretty acceptable performance out of it. I run it on a 1.3 GHz Powerbook with 768 MB of RAM.
I've tweaked it for XP and for Win98. I currently use Win98 because of the lower memory requirements and faster disk access and get speed about equivalent to a 400 MHz PC with no graphics acceleration (no doom 3 guys, but the original Doom, Descent, etc. play fine.).
XP is about the same performance except when the disk gets accessed at which time it slows to a painful crawl.
Here's my tweaking:
I use VPC for playing old Windows games that I still enjoy (alpha centauri, risk) and for running that odd windows program here and there, and this configuration works well for me.
Re:vpc is slow (Score:2)
Re:vpc is slow (Score:2)
VPC running x86 linux without X11 of any kind loaded is as speedy as you'd ever want. For shits & giggles I set it up running an identical setup as my 800mhz P3 server.
Webserving & fileserving it was almost as quick as the real P3, to the point that if someone had swapped the real box to a VPC one I probably wouldn't notice immediately. Running dnetc gave it a score around that of an 800mhz P3 as well. Its cpu emulation is no slouch, and impressed me no
Re:vpc is slow (Score:2)
Guess what? It can happen. On Amiga we could run Mac emulator 1.5x fast than a native mac with same processor.
I never understood why run VPC at all btw... Yea, corporate stuff makes you do it etc. I run Thinkfree office written in pure java and must say its doing REAL well... For windows only scanner I used vuescan from Mr. Hamrick. Now have Canon which has mac drivers, still use i
Re:vpc is slow (Score:1)
Can someone explain to me... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Can someone explain to me... (Score:4, Informative)
That's probably because of the HAL. I imagine that being able to dump instructions onto the graphics chip would require a patch to the HAL to allow an application direct access to the hardware. This would also explain why it magically runs faster on MAC OS Classic and Windows (MS has the ability to patch their own HAL, and I don't think that non OS-X MAC OS's require a HAL.)
Re:Can someone explain to me... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Can someone explain to me... (Score:1)
Yeah, he gets cranky when he has to emulate multiple architectures. It takes resources away from his cognitive subroutines.
Re:Can someone explain to me... (Score:5, Informative)
AFAIK, part of the problem is endian-swapping. The Mac and PC versions of the graphics cards have slightly different firmware and driver configurations that account for this. If a emulated PC application is running on a Mac, the graphics commands and texture info will be generated as little endian data with memory accesses assuming x86/Windows conventions. This will be different from what the OS X graphics drivers are expecting, which want big endian data and PPC-style memory accesses.
Even if the GPU is always running in little-endian mode regardless of the CPU's byte order, the communication pipeline between the original x86 app and the final OS X driver communication will possibly involve a redundant little-to-big-to-little endian swap. (Especially if this swap actually is occuring in hardware via a bridge chip or clever bus wiring or something. This is just outside my scope of expertise.) In other words, to get maximum performance, the VPC host must take on some of the responsibilities that are normally handled by OS X graphics drivers.
Re:Can someone explain to me... (Score:2)
Re:Can someone explain to me... (Score:2)
ooooOOOooo (Score:1, Funny)
How long before the XBox folks are forced to go work on XP SP3?
Re:Seriously though.. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Seriously though.. (Score:1)
Doesn't necessarily apply to Xbox 2 (Score:5, Informative)
This doesn't take into account the fact that the Xbox 2 has been announced to use a brand-new ATI video chipset. As near as I can tell, this has nothing to do with cross-compatibility between ATI and nVidia, which it would have to be if there's any relation to Xbox 2 backwards-compatibility. Just thought I'd mention it.
Re:Doesn't necessarily apply to Xbox 2 (Score:2)
Re:Doesn't necessarily apply to Xbox 2 (Score:2)
And the Connectix purchase makes a lot more sense with a PPC XBox2 in the works. I saw photos of a G5 (inside and out) in a print article about XB0x2 dev kits going out, possibly in Game Informer. The new graphics card emulation in VPC could be the first step towards a living-room-ready emulator for XBox2. If we're lucky it won't suffer from Second System Effect.
Microsoft's strategy is being revealed as "ship lots of really good games of all kinds". This ma
.NET speedups? (Score:5, Interesting)
Just a thought...
Re:.NET speedups? (Score:2)
I'm really excited about Mono, and I think that it may be able to emulate Windows.forms in the future! (with GTK...or some other binding). That said, right now Mono on the Mac is still somewhat immature (FYI)
Slow on my iBook 500 (Score:1)
I wonder if they will be able to leverage Quartz Extreme (with good video cards of course)?
Re:Slow on my iBook 500 (Score:5, Informative)
VirtualPC on my iBook 500 with 640MB RAM emulated a 266MHz PC. (That's better than 50% of native speed.)
VirtualPC on my wife's iBook G4 800 with 640MB RAM emulated a 290-300MHz PC.
VirtualPC on my Powerbook G4 1.5GHz with 512MB RAM emulates a 290-300MHz PC.
Now...I am starting to suspect that something isn't right with those numbers, since it feels faster on the Powerbook (as one would expect it to). It may be thaht VirtualPC 6 simply won't report an emulated PC speed above 300MHz to things under Windows... and I don't think it'll report an emulated speed in excess of 4x the bus (my iBook 500's bus is 66MHz * 4 = 266).
That said, I wonder what someone running it on an iBook G3-900 with a 100MHz bus would get... 300? Or 400?
Re:Slow on my iBook 500 (Score:4, Interesting)
It may be emulating a 300MHz chip, but it'll obviously run faster on the PowerBook
Re:Slow on my iBook 500 (Score:1)
Of course, I don't think VPC is slow at all, and I was quite impressed with it's performance.
SuSe 9.1 Pro was reporting 466 Mhz 686.
Re:Slow on my iBook 500 (Score:2)
Re:Slow on my iBook 500 (Score:2)
What They Should Do (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What They Should Do (Score:2)
But Microsoft scuttled the company that implemented a GDI-level virtualization for Windows when they bought Citrix and used the Citrix screen-scraper solution that became Windows Terminal Server. They didn't even let NTerprise compete against the "free" Terminal Server, the refused to license it.
Plus, GDI-level virtualization wouldn't help the XBoX project.
New Microsoft Slogan (Score:5, Funny)
I heard.... (Score:3, Funny)
OT: Non-Windows app to convert RM AIFF, MP3? (Score:2)
BTW: WinNT 4 runs nicely in VPC.
Re:OT: Non-Windows app to convert RM AIFF, MP3? (Score:1)
I haven't played with it much but it seems to do what it says (which is to record any audio playing on your Mac.)
Re:OT: Non-Windows app to convert RM AIFF, MP3? (Score:2)
There's an app called SoundConverter for OS X that claims to convert Real Audio files, but every time I feed it one it crashes. Oh well, I guess NT 4 isn't so bad in VPC; stuff like encoding MP3s could be so much faster though if it could take advantage of the G4.
Fascinating quote (Score:4, Interesting)
This is interesting...
The article implies that the guy who got fired a year or so ago for posting pictures [michaelhanscom.com] of a Microsoft loading dock full of Powermac G5s may have been fired not because of petty Mac - Windows jealously (or whatever the explanation was at the time), but because those G5s were a tool for the development for Xbox2.
Re:Fascinating quote (Score:1)
Re:Fascinating quote (Score:2)
the location of the shipping and receiving department may have been compromised. Is this reasonable? If they have only a single shipping and receiving department, there must be an awful lot of people who don't work for Microsoft and know where it is.
Plus, a big truck driving towards a building is pretty much a dead giveaway. Maybe if they were trying to keep the location of the PRINT SHOP a secret, I could find the pretext for firing him reasonable, but th
The "next" version of Virtual PC is 7.0! (Score:5, Informative)
Re:MS doesn't care (Score:1)
Next version will suck less? (Score:2)
This just in: Microsoft got a clue (Score:2)
Too bad it's Microsoft though.