Virtual PC for OSX?
DrCrawdad
What's the status?
Have you heard who Connectix is progressing with VPC for OSX?
I'd be interested to hear any further developments regarding VPC for OSX.
I've been holding up on installing OSX until VPC was ready for it.
Thanks,
DrCrawdad
Dan Stewart
when VPC for OS X would be out and if there would be an upgrade option
from VPC for OS 9. I didn't even see the July availability posted on
their web site, all I saw was "this summer".
Here is the reply I got:
= Thank you for contacting Connectix Corporation.
=
= I am sorry, but at this time we do not have a solid ETA or princing
= information to provide you.
=
= New information will be posted on our site once it is available.
Not real informative.
In article <3b4f447d$0$18891$1dc6...@news.corecomm.net>, DrCrawdad
<dcrosby1...@hotmail.com> wrote:
--
Dan Stewart
dste...@bigfoot.com
Mustang
wrote:
>I had just written an email to customer support at Connectix asking
>when VPC for OS X would be out and if there would be an upgrade option
>from VPC for OS 9. I didn't even see the July availability posted on
>their web site, all I saw was "this summer".
>
>Here is the reply I got:
>
>
>= Thank you for contacting Connectix Corporation.
>=
>= I am sorry, but at this time we do not have a solid ETA or princing
>= information to provide you.
>=
>= New information will be posted on our site once it is available.
>
>Not real informative.
>
From my conversation with one of the Connectix employees at a recent
trade show they are not very excited either. (And they don't have a
lot of good will toward Steve Jobs.)
Dan Stewart
What's their problem with Steve Jobs?
Did this employee give you any indication of when to expect VPC for OSX
or if there will be an upgrade path?
In article <86c2ltotouj77j6on...@4ax.com>, Mustang
<mus...@newsguy.com> wrote:
> From my conversation with one of the Connectix employees at a recent
> trade show they are not very excited either. (And they don't have a
> lot of good will toward Steve Jobs.)
--
Dan Stewart
dste...@bigfoot.com
Charles Martin
Dan Stewart <dste...@bigfoot.com> wrote:
> I had just written an email to customer support at Connectix asking
> when VPC for OS X would be out and if there would be an upgrade option
> from VPC for OS 9. I didn't even see the July availability posted on
> their web site, all I saw was "this summer".
>
> Here is the reply I got:
>
>
> = Thank you for contacting Connectix Corporation.
> =
> = I am sorry, but at this time we do not have a solid ETA or princing
> = information to provide you.
> =
> = New information will be posted on our site once it is available.
>
> Not real informative.
While I share your frustration, it's somewhat understandable for Connectix
to be stonewalling in this particular case.
First of all, OS X provides a tremendous POTENTIAL opportunity for
Connectix to take Virtual PC to the next level.
BUT to really do it right would require a massive effort (lots of $$ and
time).
I'm talking a 100% Cocoa application than can kill off the Apple GUI
entirely and intelligently utilise the entire system for emulation. Why,
it's possible to create a Virtual PC that would run nearly as fast as a
true PC if they worked at it.
But given OS X's anemic start, the lack of complete APIs at the moment and
the slow (expected) rate of user adoption, it's a big risk.
I expect Connectix will come out with a half-assed Carbon version of VPC
first, then probably 1-2 years from now they will really knock our socks
off.
--
_Chas_
(non-spammers should use "chasm" at mac-dot-com instead of the email above!)
"Call me old-fashioned, but I want to read email with an email client, news with
a newsreader, and browse with a browser. A Swiss army knife is no substitute for
a toolbox." -- Kevin Craig, comp.sys.mac.apps
Eric Albert
Charles Martin <stare...@myhairyballs.com> wrote:
> I'm talking a 100% Cocoa application than can kill off the Apple GUI
> entirely and intelligently utilise the entire system for emulation. Why,
> it's possible to create a Virtual PC that would run nearly as fast as a
> true PC if they worked at it.
What would doing a Cocoa version have to do with anything? Nearly all
of VPC's code is independent of Cocoa and Carbon, I'm sure, other than
graphics, and I'm sure that they'd ignore both Carbon and Cocoa's
graphics for a lower level API to get optimal performance.
Regardless of what Connectix does, they'll never be able to get nearly
equivalent performance to a PC. They're emulating a radically different
processor, and that results in a significant performance hit no matter
how you do it. They might be able to get better performance on X than
on 9, but I wouldn't guarantee it.
-Eric
--
Eric Albert ejal...@stanford.edu
http://www.stanford.edu/~ejalbert/
Mustang
And ... "This is why developers should make decisions and not CEOs"
... all the usual drivel from those without a business focus ...
All they would say about the release date was "We are committed to
releasing an OSX compatible version of Virtual PC". He later
commented that they couldn't do it unless some things in OSX were
fixed. (And then they proceeded to show me their "VPC for Windows"
product.)
On Sun, 15 Jul 2001 12:59:22 GMT, Dan Stewart <dste...@bigfoot.com>
wrote:
>What does that mean, not very excited?? Not very excited about what?
Charles Martin
Eric Albert <ejal...@stanford.edu> wrote:
> In article <cCu47.177485$_T2.35...@typhoon.tampabay.rr.com>,
> Charles Martin <stare...@myhairyballs.com> wrote:
>
> > I'm talking a 100% Cocoa application than can kill off the Apple GUI
> > entirely and intelligently utilise the entire system for emulation. Why,
> > it's possible to create a Virtual PC that would run nearly as fast as a
> > true PC if they worked at it.
>
> What would doing a Cocoa version have to do with anything? Nearly all
> of VPC's code is independent of Cocoa and Carbon, I'm sure, other than
> graphics, and I'm sure that they'd ignore both Carbon and Cocoa's
> graphics for a lower level API to get optimal performance.
You're right, I was using "Cocoa" as shorthand for "100% native and
optimised for Mac OS X."
> Regardless of what Connectix does, they'll never be able to get nearly
> equivalent performance to a PC. They're emulating a radically different
> processor, and that results in a significant performance hit no matter
> how you do it. They might be able to get better performance on X than
> on 9, but I wouldn't guarantee it.
It has been shown that the current version gets about a 30% improvement
when one kills the Finder (Mac OS 9). Imagine if you could kill the whole
GUI. Many cycles saved that could be used for emulation.
Eric Albert
Charles Martin <stare...@myhairyballs.com> wrote:
> In article <ejalbert-8891D6...@usenet.stanford.edu>,
> Eric Albert <ejal...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> > In article <cCu47.177485$_T2.35...@typhoon.tampabay.rr.com>,
> > Charles Martin <stare...@myhairyballs.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I'm talking a 100% Cocoa application than can kill off the Apple GUI
> > > entirely and intelligently utilise the entire system for emulation. Why,
> > > it's possible to create a Virtual PC that would run nearly as fast as a
> > > true PC if they worked at it.
> >
> > What would doing a Cocoa version have to do with anything? Nearly all
> > of VPC's code is independent of Cocoa and Carbon, I'm sure, other than
> > graphics, and I'm sure that they'd ignore both Carbon and Cocoa's
> > graphics for a lower level API to get optimal performance.
>
> You're right, I was using "Cocoa" as shorthand for "100% native and
> optimised for Mac OS X."
Ah. There's a big difference. :)
> > Regardless of what Connectix does, they'll never be able to get nearly
> > equivalent performance to a PC. They're emulating a radically different
> > processor, and that results in a significant performance hit no matter
> > how you do it. They might be able to get better performance on X than
> > on 9, but I wouldn't guarantee it.
>
> It has been shown that the current version gets about a 30% improvement
> when one kills the Finder (Mac OS 9). Imagine if you could kill the whole
> GUI. Many cycles saved that could be used for emulation.
The bigger reason why you see a huge performance gain through VPC when
you quit the Finder (and aren't running any other apps) on Mac OS 9 is
due to the way that classic Mac OS distributes time among processes.
Whenever a process receives time to run, it continues to run until it
explicitly yields back to the rest of the system. When that happens,
all other processes get a slice of time, each yielding in turn, and then
the original process gets time again. This is cooperative multitasking.
If any process doesn't cooperate, if it doesn't yield time, it hogs the
CPU and gets all CPU time. When you have no apps running other than
VPC, it gets all (OK, nearly all) CPU time, so it can run completely
unhindered.
On Mac OS X, there is no such thing as cooperative multitasking. When a
process gets a slice of CPU time, it gets just that -- a slice of a
specific size -- and if it uses all of it, it gets replaced with another
process, regardless of what the first process is doing. This is
preemptive multitasking -- no application can hog all of the CPU time.
That's why I'm not certain that, with everything else (graphics
performance, memory performance, I/O performance, etc.) equivalent, you
could achieve better performance on Mac OS X than on Mac OS 9 (without
the Finder on 9) with VPC. It simply can't get as much CPU time as it
does on 9, which means that it can't run as fast. Even if you could
kill the entire UI for the rest of the system, you still have a variety
of other processes running on Mac OS X that you can't eliminate -- run
"ps -auxwww" in a Terminal window to see them.
Martin Cox
Charles Martin <stare...@myhairyballs.com> wrote:
> It has been shown that the current version gets about a 30% improvement
> when one kills the Finder (Mac OS 9). Imagine if you could kill the whole
> GUI. Many cycles saved that could be used for emulation.
That's a fairly significant exaggeration.
You get maybe a 10%-15% at most improvement out of killing the Finder on
the current version of VPC.
--
Martin Cox
"Wibble" - Capt Blackadder
Charles Bouldin
Charles Martin <stare...@myhairyballs.com> wrote:
> It has been shown that the current version gets about a 30% improvement
> when one kills the Finder (Mac OS 9). Imagine if you could kill the whole
> GUI. Many cycles saved that could be used for emulation.
Reference please. I'm one of the people who believes this is a total
myth. I'm not alone in that, the latest MacWorld Secrets book by Pogue
and Schorr also states that killing the Finder has no effect on the
speed of VPC.
Chris Leeworthy
griswold <gris...@happyvalley.invalid> wrote:
>>
> Looks like a free beta (for VPC 4 registered users) for X should be
> downloadable in a few days.
Just tried it.
Running OS X 10.04
Upgraded VPC to 4.02 (as indicated in instructions).
Installed 'additions' 0006,
registered for the required serial number.
rebooted into X, and downloaded and installed the test drive.
Result?
The PC list comes up but as soon as I try and start an image it crashes
with...
"The application Virtual PC Test Drive has unexpectedly quit."
A whole evening of 'faffing about' for this little gem. :-(
I would like to hear if anyone has any success with this or if anyone
knows if I have missed something important in my installation....
--
Chris Leeworthy
REMOVE THE OBVIOUS TO EMAIL ME
Avery Raskin
Chris Leeworthy <chrisle...@NOSPAMmac.com> wrote:
> In article <01HW.B77BD15A0...@news.m.iinet.net.au>,
> griswold <gris...@happyvalley.invalid> wrote:
>
> >>
> > Looks like a free beta (for VPC 4 registered users) for X should be
> > downloadable in a few days.
>
> Just tried it.
(snip long whine)
> I would like to hear if anyone has any success with this or if anyone
> knows if I have missed something important in my installation....
Yes, you have missed the word BETA. This means you expect bugs, and
unexpected quits, and difficulty getting things to run comfortably. If
you do not know how to deal with things like this without whining, you
don't download betas. You wait until the thing is complete. If it still
doesn't act as it should, THEN you complain.
Andrew Glasgow
Charles Martin <stare...@myhairyballs.com> wrote:
> In article <ejalbert-8891D6...@usenet.stanford.edu>,
> Eric Albert <ejal...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>
> > In article <cCu47.177485$_T2.35...@typhoon.tampabay.rr.com>,
> > Charles Martin <stare...@myhairyballs.com> wrote:
> >
> > > I'm talking a 100% Cocoa application than can kill off the Apple GUI
> > > entirely and intelligently utilise the entire system for emulation. Why,
> > > it's possible to create a Virtual PC that would run nearly as fast as a
> > > true PC if they worked at it.
> >
> > What would doing a Cocoa version have to do with anything? Nearly all
> > of VPC's code is independent of Cocoa and Carbon, I'm sure, other than
> > graphics, and I'm sure that they'd ignore both Carbon and Cocoa's
> > graphics for a lower level API to get optimal performance.
>
> You're right, I was using "Cocoa" as shorthand for "100% native and
> optimised for Mac OS X."
Well, stop, because it's misleading.
> > Regardless of what Connectix does, they'll never be able to get nearly
> > equivalent performance to a PC. They're emulating a radically different
> > processor, and that results in a significant performance hit no matter
> > how you do it. They might be able to get better performance on X than
> > on 9, but I wouldn't guarantee it.
>
> It has been shown that the current version gets about a 30% improvement
> when one kills the Finder (Mac OS 9). Imagine if you could kill the whole
> GUI. Many cycles saved that could be used for emulation.
In OS X, I'm sure that this would be greatly reduced to the true
premptive multitasking. The finder could just page out to disk and do
nothing while in the background.
Killing the GUI, i.e. the windowserver, would have the rather
unfortunate result of dumping you back out to the login screen.
Besides, if there were no GUI, what would VPC use to display? It would
have to at least be using CoreGraphics to do its displays, if not Carbon
or Cocoa display APIs... any programmers, is it possible to do
Coregraphics with no windowserver running?
--
| Andrew Glasgow <amg39(at)cornell.edu> |
| SCSI is *NOT* magic. There are *fundamental technical |
| reasons* why it is necessary to sacrifice a young goat |
| to your SCSI chain now and then. -- John Woods |
Chris Leeworthy
Avery Raskin <ara...@mac.com> wrote:
> In article <180720012242480562%chrisle...@NOSPAMmac.com>,
> Chris Leeworthy <chrisle...@NOSPAMmac.com> wrote:
>
> > In article <01HW.B77BD15A0...@news.m.iinet.net.au>,
> > griswold <gris...@happyvalley.invalid> wrote:
> >
> > >>
> > > Looks like a free beta (for VPC 4 registered users) for X should be
> > > downloadable in a few days.
> >
> > Just tried it.
> (snip long whine)
Actually a short whine. Most of what was in there was a description of
my installation procedure just in case anyone could offer me some
genuine advice.
>
> > I would like to hear if anyone has any success with this or if anyone
> > knows if I have missed something important in my installation....
>
> Yes, you have missed the word BETA. This means you expect bugs, and
> unexpected quits, and difficulty getting things to run comfortably. If
> you do not know how to deal with things like this without whining, you
> don't download betas. You wait until the thing is complete. If it still
> doesn't act as it should, THEN you complain.
I didn' t miss the word beta at all, however the readme file for the
test drive gave no indication that the set up may crash 'at the first
hurdle' i.e. when trying to start up a disk image.
I've actually done what should be done and sent the info back to
connectix as feedback.
It seems you have some aggression you need to express. If I'm the
target thats fine, get it out of your system, I'm sure you'll feel
better for it.
In the meantime if you or anyone else has any tips or advice that might
get this thing working I would appreciate hearing them.
Kevin Michael Vail
Leeworthy <chrisle...@NOSPAMmac.com> wrote:
> In article <01HW.B77BD15A0...@news.m.iinet.net.au>,
> griswold <gris...@happyvalley.invalid> wrote:
>
> [snip]
> rebooted into X, and downloaded and installed the test drive.
>
> Result?
>
> The PC list comes up but as soon as I try and start an image it crashes
> with...
>
> "The application Virtual PC Test Drive has unexpectedly quit."
>
> A whole evening of 'faffing about' for this little gem. :-(
>
> I would like to hear if anyone has any success with this or if anyone
> knows if I have missed something important in my installation....
It works for me. I haven't done anything extensive with it yet but it
does boot Windows, and I've run a couple of programs in Windows with
it.
It won't be completely useful for me until it does full-screen mode,
but at least I don't have to reboot back to 9 just to get a couple of
files off the Windows disk.
--
Kevin Michael Vail | a billion stars go spinning through the night,
ke...@vaildc.net | blazing high above your head.
. . . . . . . . . | But _in_ you is the presence that
. . . . . . . . . | will be, when all the stars are dead. (Rainer Maria Rilke)
Chris Leeworthy
<ke...@vaildc.net> wrote:
> It works for me. I haven't done anything extensive with it yet but it
> does boot Windows, and I've run a couple of programs in Windows with
> it.
>
> It won't be completely useful for me until it does full-screen mode,
> but at least I don't have to reboot back to 9 just to get a couple of
> files off the Windows disk.
Thanks Kevin.
What kind of Mac set up are you running this on?
Kevin Michael Vail
Leeworthy <chrisle...@NOSPAMmac.com> wrote:
G4 Cube, 450MHz, 256MB RAM, 15-inch LCD.
Avery Raskin
Chris Leeworthy <chrisle...@NOSPAMmac.com> wrote:
Works for me too, though I'm not exactly missing full-screen mode (so
there are scroll bars at either end - not exactly a major problem). So
far, while I could be imagining this, it seems like Windows is running
faster on the VPC/X preview than it does on VPC4/9.+
Charles Martin
<charles.bouldin-A8...@news1.rdc1.md.home.com>,
Charles Bouldin <charles...@nist.gov> wrote:
I'm repeating what I've heard others say, I'm afraid.
It seems clear that there is SOME benefit to be gained by killing the
Finder, but exactly how much varies. If you prefer, you can believe the
people who say it's only a 10-15% improvement.
Chris Leeworthy
Avery Raskin <aver...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> Works for me too, though I'm not exactly missing full-screen mode (so
> there are scroll bars at either end - not exactly a major problem). So
> far, while I could be imagining this, it seems like Windows is running
> faster on the VPC/X preview than it does on VPC4/9.+
Thanks guys.
I tried installing it on my G4 Powerbook and it runs OK there.
I have managed to get it going a couple of times on my iMac but it just
seems a lot happier with a G4 running the show I think...