Is there only virtual pc for osx?

[Rikintosh]

In terms of x86 emulation, is there only virtualpc on the osx platform? I mean, on mac os 9 and earlier there were many different solutions, but on osx, I only know about virtual pc (besides bochs for msdos and complicated qemu), were there other x86 emulation solutions on powerpc with OSX that I don't know about?

Is VirtualPC really the fastest of all? I read somewhere that VPC6 is faster than VPC7. I only used emulation once, when I had an imac g5 1.8ghz, and it ran winxp in a slow and horrible way. I wanted to test the limits of what games I can run inside an x86 emulator on PowerPC (just for fun).

 

[Doq]

Virtual PC is probably your best option. If you're looking for alternatives, Q is a Qemu-based solution that might suit your needs.

Really the limiting factor is that it's real emulation, rather than the virtualisation that you might be used to with x86 platforms, and with real emulation, the emulator has to translate every single instruction to make it work-- as opposed to virtualisation which lets the host CPU do most of the work and just does a bit of interception.

 

[weckart]

VPC5 is supposedly the fastest with the most features. YMMV as ever.

 

[Dronecatcher]

@Rikintosh You could try this version of DOSBox - I've only used it for Fasttracker as shown but that is impossible to emulate on PowerPC in any other way:

DOSBox For PPC

New from Dr Kaiser... https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2019/12/and-now-for-something-completely.html My only use for DOSBox is with seminal mod player, Fasttracker - which in the past was only barely doable on my 1.67 Powerbook with the CPU screaming towards 100%. Now with the new version from...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[Hughmac]

There's always Guest PC as well - https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/guestpc-19

Cheers

Hugh

 

[Amethyst1]

I'd forget about "normal" XP as a guest OS, no matter what emulator you run. In my experience, for Virtual PC the best options are Windows 95, 2000 (with all optimisations you can think of; it was slow on my 1.25 GHz G4 nonetheless) or a heavily slimmed-down XP such as MicroXP. For games, the 1995 S3 Trio GPU VPC emulates is only going to get you so far. For DOS games, I'd look into e.g. DOSBox.

 

[theMarble]

In my experience, for Virtual PC the best options are Windows 95, 2000 (with all optimisations you can think of; it was slow on my 1.25 GHz G4 nonetheless)

A long time ago, I ran 98 SE on my A1046 with VPC7. That was the 1GHz model. Believe I had either 512MB or 768MB of RAM dedicated to it. The OS ran fine, didn't try out any games or web browsing though.

 

[Doq]

I keep VPC7 around with a build of Windows FLP-- a special build of Windows XP (I believe Embedded) built specifically to target older systems, and it runs well enough for my use case.

 

[wicknix]

A G5 with the proper OS will have VPC running decently. As mentioned, here is MicroXP running on my PMG5. It's performance is respectable.

 

[Pedro Passamani]

I ran Windows 98 SE on a 400 MHz G3 iMac with Virtual PC 6 under Mac OS 9.2 and the performance was good for basic tasks. I even tried running a game, Counter-Strike 1.6, but it was a slideshow, although the game loaded the map just fine. OTOH, I tried running Windows XP on a 1.2 GHz 12" iBook G4 with Virtual PC 7 under Leopard and it ran badly. Almost unusable.

 

[Rikintosh]

I ran Windows 98 SE on a 400 MHz G3 iMac with Virtual PC 6 under Mac OS 9.2 and the performance was good for basic tasks. I even tried running a game, Counter-Strike 1.6, but it was a slideshow, although the game loaded the map just fine. OTOH, I tried running Windows XP on a 1.2 GHz 12" iBook G4 with Virtual PC 7 under Leopard and it ran badly. Almost unusable.

Now that you mention it, I remembered that in the past I also ran windows 98 on the iMac g3, I even took a picture. But I don't remember how it performed.

 

[Dronecatcher]

My iBook with SoftWindows 98:

And Powerbook with Windows 2000: