Virtualization - I'm running 4 OSes on one machine!

[Ryan Clark]

Hey all,

I'm not sure how many of you are interested in cross-platform development, but I know that there are at least a few of us here developing for Win/Mac/Lin, so I thought my recent experiences might be helpful.

I bought myself a MacBook Pro last week, with the intention of triple booting (http://wiki.onmac.net/index.php/Triple_Boot_via_BootCamp) Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. However, by random chance today (saw it in someone's Slashdot comment), I found out about this:

http://www.parallels.com/

I'm running the beta OS X version, and it lets you run various operating systems via virtualization (no rebooting needed, runs in a window). I was skeptical at first, but now that I've got Professor Fizzwizzle running on Linux (two flavours), Mac OS X, and Windows XP all from a single desktop, simultaneously, I'm a believer. The virtual OSes all run very quickly too, which was surprising to me.

Using this technology I'll be able to make our various builds without having to reboot over and over again! Also, I plan to add a virtual Win98 install for testing purposes... hopefully in the future they'll add support to virtualize OSX, so I can keep older versions (10.2, 10.3) around for testing, too.

Anyway, just thought this might be helpful to some of you. It'll be very helpful to me, and the pricetag on the software is quite low (compared to what I was expecting). If you've got any questions about it, I'm happy to answer.

(Note: I am in no way affiliated with Parallels! I just like their software, and can't believe how well it works.)

[Ryan Clark]

Also, another neat thing I almost forgot about: We saved about $300 on the MacBook Pro by signing up for the Apple Developer Connection ($500), which gives you a discount on hardware. The ADC also gets you updates for OS X and other Apple software, a few code-level support incidents, and other stuff.

Well worth it (since it essentially costs you negative dollars), if you're already planning to buy a Mac!

[vjvj]

Wow, that looks awesome!

Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it emulates the OpenGL driver (they mention that Direct3D support is coming). However, it's still quite cool.

[ggambett]

You should also check VMWare and Xen. AFAIK none of these emulate a hardware accelerate video card :(

[Ryan Clark]

That's true, there's no 3D support, but I've still got a dual boot (via Boot Camp) in case I need to run something natively, or with 3D support.

Lucky for us, however, we do all of our rendering in software with SDL, so there are no issues.

[vjvj]

Yeah, that's no fault against the software itself. Emulating a 3D driver is no easy task :)

I'm still imagining running an instance of xcode on my main box and remotely debugging on a nearby Mac. Totally pointless, but neat nonetheless!

[Nikster]

Does that mean we will see macos running on regular intel pc's ? I've seen some emulators for the PC as I was going to buy v9 of macos to do it that way to save me having to buy a mac, don't know if anyone has tried any of that.

[Sharpfish]

Does that mean we will see macos running on regular intel pc's ? I've seen some emulators for the PC as I was going to buy v9 of macos to do it that way to save me having to buy a mac, don't know if anyone has tried any of that.

Yeah, I'd like to know that also - if anyone has got a decent mac emulation running (pear?) that gives decent performance. I wouldn't rely on it long term but for a year or so to get my feet wet on mac dev it would be good.

[Ryan Clark]

Does that mean we will see macos running on regular intel pc's ?
Possibly, but it may be a while (unless Apple does it themselves!). I've heard that OS X uses some strange new method of boot loading, so a standard PC won't be able to handle it without some hacking. Emulation should be possible, though...

[jmc]

http://www.diyimac.com/

Jmc

[Anthony Flack]

I don't think Apple want you to do that.

I also think that a good deal of the charm of Mac OS is that it's designed to work as an integrated package with Apple hardware; as opposed to Windows which has to work with every Frankenstein PC out there.

[GolfHacker]

I was wondering if anyone can give an update on Parallels and how it works, now that 1-1/2 years have passed. Are you still using it? Does it support OpenGL yet?

I really like the possibilities that this solution offers, but of course I need to be able to run my OpenGL games on both Windows and Linux virtual OSes. I'm considering switching to Mac, and this is the deal maker or breaker for me. Thanks.

[Jesse Hopkins]

Good Lord! I used Basilisk II (mac OS emulator) on a PC for a while to get my Overture files converted before Geniesoft went cross platform. I still like Basilisk II. It is nice to see my old Mac desktop now and then.

Is it actually possible to do multiple platform game development using Emulators? I would think there'd be too many limitations.

[Diragor]

I was wondering if anyone can give an update on Parallels and how it works, now that 1-1/2 years have passed. Are you still using it? Does it support OpenGL yet?

I really like the possibilities that this solution offers, but of course I need to be able to run my OpenGL games on both Windows and Linux virtual OSes. I'm considering switching to Mac, and this is the deal maker or breaker for me. Thanks.

Parallels is working great for me. I've heard some comments about VMWare Fusion being better and/or faster, but I've got no complaints about Parallels and no reason to try anything else right now. Parallels now has Direct3D support. I tried Quake IV in a WinXP Parallels VM, and it didn't run that great but I was impressed with it as a first step for the feature. The game actually ran a lot better in that VM than it does on my laptop, which is only a little over a year old and has an ATI m200 (or something like that) in it. That doesn't help you if you need OpenGL support, but at least there's been some progress made on 3D hardware support in a VM.

[Cygon]

Afaik, VMware (with installed drivers for its virtual graphics card, of course) has support for Direct3D 8.0 and Direct3D 9.0 as long as only Direct3D 8.0-level features are used. They plan on extending this support.

I'm using MS Virtual PC, though, it's also free and makes use of AMD-V (hey, a rhyme!)

-Markus-

[GolfHacker]

Sorry for resurrecting this thread once again, but I finally took the plunge and replaced my desktop computer with a Mac Pro. I'm trying to use Boot Camp to install Windows XP. I got to the Boot Camp screen where it is creating the partition (its like the 2nd or 3rd screen). I dragged the divider to allocate 50GB for the Windows partition on drive bay #2 (a 500MB drive) and clicked the Partition button. It's been on this same page now for 6 hours, with a status that still reads "Partitioning disk...".

Is it normally this slow?? Or is it stuck?

I haven't even gotten to the point yet where I insert my Windows XP CD...

[FabianMatyas]

It seems like the installer got stucked :(.
Before retrying to installing Boot Camp I think it would be wise to upgrade to the latest Leopard version since Boot Camp is an unsupported beta application and it gets fixed along the way with every new Leopard version.
You should also verify your disk using Disk Utility.

Below are two threads which seem to be closely related to your problem:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6516922
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1432095&tstart=60

[Nikster]

I had that also, I think it's hit and miss, I also had the same stuck problem installing xcode too, a reboot and a reinstall and it was happy, although this makes me laugh at the fanboys who says macosx is rock ;)

You won't have this having a pro, but as I use a Microsoft keyboard with my mac mini and when it updates bootcamp xp side it's fecking annoying when it puts that chuffing mac keyboard layout driver back.. stop it apple damnit!

[GolfHacker]

@FabianMatyas: Thank you so very much! That first link solved it. For some reason, Apple did not turn on Journaling on the second hard drive. Once I turned that on, it worked great.

Now I'm going to see if I can get Parallels working...

[GolfHacker]

Just a quick update: I got Parallels working, and it works fairly well. I'm even able to run the Windows versions of my OpenGL-based games through Parallels on Mac, and the games work very well (Dirk is a bit jerky, but playable). I'm quite impressed.

It took a little while to get it configured. I had to download the latest version from their web site - the version in the box kept crashing on startup. But once I updated it, it worked fairly well. Except when I installed a new/updated driver or a security patch. Then it would start crashing again. But reinstalling the 5600 upgrade solved it. Now that it is all configured, it is running flawlessly. I love it!

The other problem I had was that Windows seems to think it is running on different machines when I boot it with Boot Camp versus running it in a virtual machine. So I got the stupid Windows activation message while I was trying to set it up and configure it, and ended up I had to reactivate my copy of Windows over the phone because it wouldn't take my product key anymore. I don't blame Parallels for this, though. Microsoft is so annoying.

Anyway, I've got Windows and Mac running together on the same machine, and it's great. I can access files in my Mac home directory from my Windows programs, and I can do builds and test my games all from Mac (regardless of OS). This weekend, I'm going to try setting up another virtual machine with Linux and see how it goes.

[Pogacha]

Late!
Do not partition the disk on 50gb if you are planning to use Windows for something more than testing.

I did this mistake with 80gb and now I can't change it :(

[GolfHacker]

Thanks, good point! I forgot to mention that - I found documentation on that and decided to go with a 32GB partition. If you go with anything larger, then Boot Camp will format it as NTFS. Unfortunately, Mac can't write to NTFS. But if you go with 32GB or less, you can format it as FAT32. Mac and read and right from a FAT32 partition. This makes it a lot easier to transfer files to/from the Windows partition, if needed.

So far, I haven't needed to do that when I'm running Parallels. Parallels mounts the Mac partition on Windows as Z:, so my Windows programs can access all my data files that reside on Mac.

[Nikster]

Don't you mean GB ? :) 32MB seems small even if you put DOS on ;)

Also true image should let you back your data and restore incase you want to resize partitions safely and quickly.

[GolfHacker]

Thanks, Nikster, I edited my post to correct that.

[Uhfgood]

Don't you mean GB ? 32MB seems small even if you put DOS on

What do you mean? Dos 6 is only about 8 megs. That leaves me a whole 24 megabytes to do anything I want! Tons of games, word processors and the like! Who needs more than that?!?