Topic: Just got Virtual PC 7.0 with Windows XP Home

[Commander Maxillius]

...and it takes forever to boot.  However, the slice of forever it takes is concurrent with the fact that according to Windows, my Mini is a 664 MHz 686

Next feat:  loading OP.  Wish me luck!

[Commander Maxillius]

Well folks, the verdict is that (duh!) Microsoft is crap.

My 664 MHz emulated PC runs about 200 MHz slower than reported, and even though 464 MHz is enough to run OP, this setup won't. 

OP installed fine (though it took 15 minutes), but every time I go to start it up, it gets as far as the black screen before the loading screen, then dumps right back to the desktop.  There's even the OP icon in the dock for that split second before it stops.

What would make OP do that on a Windows machine?  Perhaps I can devise a workaround for VPC.

[toasty0]

Lack on memory for one thing. Bad or out of date vid drivers...a lot of others things have nada to do with VirtualPC.

Jerry

[Commander Maxillius]

Maybe Microsoft doesn't suck as much as i thought , but perhaps they made VPC7 *too* well.

Let me explain...

Mac users aren't used to having to search for drivers for their hardware since Apple built their system and loaded the disk with everything you need to use it, including the drivers to all the hardware it has.  However, in the Land of Windows, when you install the OS, you're only installing Windows.  Although the thing may boot and look fine, if you have no video drivers (or the standard Windows display driver), the screen will refresh very slowly, like you're missing 33% of your processor.  I should've remembered that little tidbit since the same thing happened when I put a fresh copy of XP Home on my other machine.  I couldn't figure out what was wrong until I visited PCPitstop and checked out my display settings.  What should've read "nVidia GeForce 4" instead said "generic display driver", so I had to sit through a 3 hour download to get my sweet graphics back. 

So here I am doing the same thing, but for a virtual PC.  I can't think of one reason why Microsoft couldn't've worked more closely with Apple to make VPC work with more of the Mac's components instead of making the two interact as if they were on a network, and requiring a separate set of display drivers.

Oh well.  I'll check back here and let y'all know how it turns out.  Thanks Toasty

[Death_Merchant]

Anything that tries to access hardware (like games trying to talk to video cards) works poorly or not at all with VPC.

Remember, VPC emulates the video card as well. Everything must be crunched by your Mac's CPU.

I've long given up trying to run any SFC games on VPC. Even if it worked, "slow" would be an understatement.