[lythari]

Have any of you tried running PC games on mac via VPC? Is it worth it? I know that there will be a performance hit but how big is it?

Secondly, how well do classic games work on OSX?

I'm asking because I'm a PC user who is considering getting a powerbook next year and I want to be sure I can do everything I want on it (ie. play games ) before I buy.

[mac freak]

What games do you want to play? They might have Mac versions.

As for running games in VPC, yes, there is a SEVERE performance hit. But if your friend really has his heart set on playing games in VPC, make sure he buys VPC/Win95, because anything else is just too slow, and Win95 still runs everything new anyway.

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Be Happy.

[roders]

I've heard a lot of different things about game performance in VPC.
Some people say as mac freak does that game performance can take a serious hit, this maybe true, but if you have a good graphics card (it must be a PCI or AGP card, & you might even need an extra card even if you already have a PCI or AGP card, this obviuosly rules out Laptops) then I have heard that games performance can be quite good, this is because to play games virtual PC will activate and use a normal "PC" spec graphics card, which is why you need a second card and cannot get hardware 3D accleration (only software, which sucks BIG time) for D3D (& ActiveX components) in a Laptop; Even in a PowerMac G4 tower, you'll need a second "PC spec" graphics card, although Voodoo 3's are dirt cheap at the moment
the reason I think people have said games performance can be good (not stellar, & not nessecarilly for the latest games) is because the Graphics card is handling most of the work load, (nativley as the computers CPU is handling all the emulation) so the CPU speed of your computer becomes the biggest deciding factor.
Basically VPC will emulate a pentium class (P2) chip running at (least) half the speed of any given G3 or G4.
Getting "CVGS" (playstaion emulator) would probably be a safer bet performance wise (its a lot cheaper too).
Macfreak's right about the Win 95 version of VPC to its noticaably faster than Win 98 under VPC.
As for games in OSX, native OSX games when they arrive should be stormin, and most upto date or new (classic/OS9) games will be carbonisied in the fullness of time (so they will run nativly in OSX).
But an easy way to be able to use the classic enviroment in OSX and run games under OS9 with optimal performance would be to partion your drive and install OS9 on one partiton & OSX on the/another.
This is what I have done & I can use ther classic enviroment in OSX, but I can also choose to boot into OS9 on it's own, as well as OSX on it's own, obviously.
P.S hope this helps + any fairly new Mac games you wanted to play in the classic enviroment should be carbonsied soon (around the realease of OSX1.0) there are also many more games coming to the Mac platform from the PC side and in general.
And finally!
To answer your ORIGINAL question games do suffer a performance hit in th classic enviroment, but it's not too bad, although when your gaming you want/need all the perfromace you can get.
P. get lots of Ram if you want to run VPC well, it's a good program, but it's not really for proceessor intensive tasks, just general, light computer work/tasks.

[Evinyatar]

Honestly, I'm seriously having my doubts about gaming on MacOS X. Fullscreen Classic games don't work in MacOS X (never got UT or Shogo to work for instance) and the only OS X game I've seen doesn't work (4x4 Evolution. It crashes). Saying that there will be tons of (stable) OS X native games around there is a bit exaggerated I think; game developers want a broad market and I don't think the average iMac gamer will be switching to MacOS X any time soon, especially with the inability of MacOS X to run Classic games.
Some die-hard mac fans will want to shoot me for this, but only because it's the truth and they don't like it one bit.
Having two partitions is indeed the only way to run Classic games, but then again... what would you be using MacOS X for?

[austeros]

whoa, don't forget that osX that you are playing with is still just a few month old beta. i am not saying that there won't be problems, but i don't thing steve jobs will release the osX final if you can not play classic games. he has, afterall, worked hard to get mac gaming to the state that it exists now. if we did get nVidia, then i would bet dollars to pesos that it will be a smoother transition then what we would all hope for.

thats just my 2 cents

[mac freak]

Diablo II works in Classic... although I get about 25 fps instead of the 35 I get in OS 9.

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Be Happy.

[sniffer]

I have VPC with 98. And I wouldn´t recomend you to try playing games on it, it´s soo slow. The problem is that it doesn´t only emulates the cpu, but the hole wintel pc, even the network card. So don´t expect to play any bigger games then quake1 in dos mode. But in the other hand, it´s stable as a rock. Even more stable than running on a wintel cpu...(That´s my experience.. But it crashed my mac when I tried to run beos 5.. hehe).
If you are serius of running wintel applications on your mac, You better check out softwindows98. I haven´t tried it YET, but it should be faster, teoreticly, since it does mainly emulate the wintel cpus, and take adventages of the orginal mac hardware. Not as stable, but allot faster!

peace

[lythari]

Thanks a lot for your replies!

I have SoftWindows 98, and it's slow…but it's runnable. I got Warcraft 2 to work on it a couple of years ago (right when I got it) normal speed, but Red Alert wasn't quite as fast. Right now I just use it for the Microsoft C++ program. But I have a 400 G3, so maybe it would run better on a G4 or a faster G3.

[SpeedRacer]

Originally posted by lythari:
Have any of you tried running PC games on mac via VPC? Is it worth it? I know that there will be a performance hit but how big is it?

Secondly, how well do classic games work on OSX?

Great posts here. Just make sure you are not trying to run VPC under OS X - the current version will not function under X and a X-compliant update is not expected until after X 1.0 is released.

Speed