Can I bypass aqua on startup?

[RedStar]

Some friends are having a lan party friday(unreal, age of empires, warcraftIII, medal of honor, half life, whatnot). I have none of these games for my mac and was thinking about running under virtual PC...stop laughing I'm not done yet;).....Would it be possible to bypass starting aqua go righhtinto a terminal window and open vpc so that the graphics card is free?? I get laughed at enough by my friends for having a mac, I would hate to have to just sit and watch. Any other thoughts or ideas?

[::maroma::]

I may be talking out of my arse, but what about starting up holding down Command-S? Don't know if Single User Mode is what you are looking for.

[Ricky]

I've always held down Command + S to run /sbin/fsck -y. I think you hold down Command + V to enter verbose mode and bypass Aqua.

[iBabo]

here is the minor problem with command -s. that boots up into directly darwin. which means no aqua (good for you) but also no APIs such as carbon/cocoa(bad for you). see, without any API's you cant run any of those graphical mac os x programs. a better alternative is to boot into aqua, and then launch VPC, and then quit the finder, and every other program that you can. and if you run VPC in full screen, VPC is using all of your graphics card. although now that i think about it, VPC has software render for games so your kinda out of luck. although i was talking to a guy at the apple store a while back, and he said that VPC runs really well with hardware acceleration with a voodoo card. take what you will from there.

[wataru]

[Edit: I got preempted by another poster, but I'll leave my original comments]

Ok, it's time for a reality check:

VPC cannot use your video card for 3D acceleration. Even if it could, it would still be way too slow to play games on.

If you don't boot to Aqua, you can only run CLI programs. VPC is, of course, not a CLI app.

You're a victim of too much wishful thinking.

[Addendum]
VPC was once able to use Voodoo2 cards, but that functionality is long since gone (and completely impossible on OS X). None of the games you mentioned would run acceptably on a Voodoo2 even natively in OS 9.

[Addendum 2]
Verbose mode is only during startup. Once startup completes you either go to the normal login screen or you auto-login to your account.

[dwishbone]

it sux they took out voodoo support.
i used to play Quake 2 on my B&W G3 way before it was released for the Mac. It was very playable as well since the graphics were completely handled by the graphics card. i needed to attach a second monitor when i wanted to do it...but hey...it was Quake 2 on a Mac before I could get it. Halflife worked pretty decently too.
Taking that support out was a big leap backwards in VPC to me.

[thanatos]

Originally posted by RedStar:
Some friends are having a lan party friday(unreal, age of empires, warcraftIII, medal of honor, half life, whatnot). I have none of these games for my mac and was thinking about running under virtual PC...stop laughing I'm not done yet;).....Would it be possible to bypass starting aqua go righhtinto a terminal window and open vpc so that the graphics card is free?? I get laughed at enough by my friends for having a mac, I would hate to have to just sit and watch. Any other thoughts or ideas?

Unreal and Warcraft III are available for the Mac, why you don't buy them? Warcraft III is on a hybrid CD so the PC version and the Mac version is on the same CD!!!

What you want to say is that you can't play you friends pirated PC games otherwise you would buy the Mac version of these games...

:rolleyes:

[Northform]

Virtual PC cannot use a graphics card full-stop. It is a limitation of the way they programmed it.

[milhous]

if you're a mac user and want to play lots of pc games, just get an el cheapo peecee with a nice video card and you'll be set. there's nothing wrong with doing that either.

[Detrius]

Originally posted by dwishbone:
it sux they took out voodoo support.
i used to play Quake 2 on my B&W G3 way before it was released for the Mac. It was very playable as well since the graphics were completely handled by the graphics card. i needed to attach a second monitor when i wanted to do it...but hey...it was Quake 2 on a Mac before I could get it. Halflife worked pretty decently too.
Taking that support out was a big leap backwards in VPC to me.

By letting go of the Voodoo2 support, they were able to take advantage of certain features of the G3 (and higher) processors that enabled VPC to run about twice as fast. Since only a significantly small portion of their users actually used this feature, they removed it.

There was always the possibility of having two versions installed... one to run the Voodoo2, the other to do emulation twice as fast.

[Nephron]

Am I missing something? AOE and Warcraft III are available for the Mac. Why not run them natively, rather than in VPC?

Cheers!