VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘games’

Almost as if to segue from my recent Virtumania Podcast episode about type 2 hypervisors, VMware has announced the release of the public betas for the latest versions of their popular Workstation and Player desktop products. Touting several new features and performance improvements, VMware Workstation 7.1 and Player 3.1 betas can now be downloaded from their VMware Beta Community pages.

I am downloading my copy as I write this post, but several new features have caught my attention.

• Open GL 2.1 support for Windows 7 and Vista guests
• Improved graphics support enabling high resolution videos in VMs
• Autologin for Windows Guests
• Inclusion of the OVF 1.0 command line tool to convert VMs to .OVF files for exporting to other hypervisors
• 8 way vCPU support in VMs
• up to 2TB virtual disks
• Direct Launch – drag icon to host desktop and seamlessly start an application inside a VM – even after closing VMware Workstation or Player.
• Support for Fedora 12 as a guest OS
• VMware Ace upgraded to version 3.7

Also, I can’t help but notice Known Issues from the Release Notes such as the following:

“Display

• Exiting FIFA 08 game on Windows 7 guests and hosts with Aero enabled, might cause the desktop wallpaper to turn black.
• There are known issues with the ATI Linux driver 10.2. VMware recommends that you use ATI Linux driver 9.11 for the best 3D user experience.”

Looks like I’ve got some new testing to do! (and maybe a new 3D games video to make!)

Copying more information from the Release Notes:

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve spent too much time the last few weeks figuring out how to enable Direct3D hardware pass through in VirtualBox version 3.0.2, and then testing how well some of my games work in a virtual machine (VM). Check the end of this post for a 3 minute video I put together showing some of my results. The video is a sequence of desktop captures. What you are watching is my entire Ubuntu Jaunty desktop with the VirtualBox console open in the center. The games are being played full screen inside the VirtualBox VM. I did not record the actual game sound because I could not figure out how to do it with gtk-recordmydesktop (kept getting an error when sound capture was enabled). So, I created a my own mix of several popular songs for the video sound track instead.

Long story short, the only acceptable configuration I was able to achieve was on a 32 bit Ubuntu Jaunty host with a 32 bit Windows XP guest. My Ubuntu host does not even have virtualization assist technology in the processor – go figure! I first tried 32 bit Vista and Windows 7 RC VMs on a 64 bit Ubuntu host with Intel VT, but had no luck. [side note: Windows 7 is not advertised as supported for VirtualBox Direct3d yet anyways]

I had read a lot of forum threads and blog posts recently about how disappointed those who have tried already were, but, after the first couple of attempts I am quite pleased with my game(s) performance in a Windows XP VM. Not all of my games worked for various different reasons, but with a little research and some tweaks for everything from video performance to compatibility mode settings I got a handful of them to run. On the games that did not work, I left them installed. I’ll use VirtualBox’s OVF export feature to move this VM between different operating systems and PC hardware in the future hopefully for different results.

My Youtube video is embedded at the end of this post, but first here are some notes on my setup and about my efforts. Read the rest of this entry »

VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation, VMware Player, Virtual PC, Virtualbox, and Parrallels all have various supported and unsupported abilities to run 3-D games and applications in guest operating systems. I’m sure there are other platforms with this ability too. Not that any of us have the time to “test enhanced graphics applications” on virtual infrastructure, but it would be convenient to have a centralized list of known working games. Although, I have not tested any of the actual games, I do use a Virtualbox XP VM to provide my sons web based gaming at family sites like Playhouse Disney and Nickolodeon. To be honest I was surprised when even these Flash and ActiveX based games worked (I’m guessing that’s what kind of games they are).

Here are some general assumptions (based on what I understand about Sun xVM Virtualbox, VMware Fusion, and VMware Workstation’s current capabilities) about using 3-D in virtual machines. Read the rest of this entry »