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Virtualbox 3.0 Announces OpenGL/Direct3D Support
bl8n8r writes "Apparently, Virtualbox 3.0 released today (2009-07-01) brings with it 'OpenGL 2.0 for Windows, Linux and Solaris guests; and experimental support for Direct3D 8/9 applications on Windows guests.' Maybe we can finally game in a VM?"
What do you mean finally? I'm playing Minesweeper in a VM now.
"Experimental" generally means "full of tons of bugs." 3D virtualization seems like it is just hard to do, at this point. VMWare has been working on it and at this point it isn't even "experimental" in the latest version of VMWare Workstation. Well it works... kinda. It's fairly slow and there are some rendering errors. I can get WoW to run, but it isn't all that playable.
I've been watching this sort of thing with interest since old games are one of the things I'm very fond of. However at this point, 3D VMs seem to be an experimental playtoy, not something that can be used for serious gaming.
I use Virtual box on a pair of mac intel core duo 2 machines to run windows XP pro I'm very pleased with it. It essentially works perfectly. I don't care that it is only single processor since All I want is basic seemless windows functionality for those few cases where software is windows only.
it works well with USB devices. I use it to program Lego Mindostorms, and for Midi (to USB) keyboard input and some thumb drives.
it will mount any folder on my mac disk either permenantly or temporarily (these show us as X: or Y: or whatever). What's mildly annoying is that this is 2 step process: first you tell the VM to "add the drive" then you have to use a windows "run" command "net use x: " to tell windows about it. the second step seems strange to me, but you only do it one time.
I've had three things I could not figure out.
I never was able to get a windows media player to mount in media player mode so I could use windows DRM protected WMA files on it and manage it from within windows media player 11. Instead it only will mount as a thumb drive.
I was not able to get a virtual CD device to mount an iso image or burn an iso image (as a work around for getting the WMA files in a format I could play).
It will not burn a CD or DVD.
also I never figured out how to add my Samsung C310 printer to it or my HP multifunction printer to it. it does see them, it just never finds the drivers. However I'm pretty certain this is a windows driver problem and nothing to do with the VM.
I don't game so open GL means squat to me.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It only works on Windows guests. Only DirectX is supported, not OpenGL.
I played around with this a bit in the beta. It's significantly slower than native and has a fair share of graphics glitches, but it was good enough to take my dual-monitor computer, plug in a second keyboard and mouse, and play two games of Warcraft III against eachother simultaneously using only one box.
I remember VMware implementing this several months ago. It was experimental, I don't know about it's status right now.
Ummm... actually, it's been a feature in VMWare for several years... It was experimental in VMWare 5.0 but it has been standard in the past three major releases: 5.5, 6.0 and 6.5. FWIW, VMWare tends to do major updates in 0.5 increments and you can go from 5.0->5.5 and 6.0->6.5 for free... It's a nice way for only paying for half your major upgrades. Minor upgrades are a smaller decimal value added on (i.e. 5.51, 5.52, etc) and those are always free.
Well, hopefully this could put people over the edge to use Linux full-time (myself included). Many people currently use Windows for gaming, and don't dual-boot because it's a hassle. If I could run in Linux 24/7, and run my games without rebooting, either in a VM or in Wine, that would be excellent.
Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
With virtualbox from Sun! now with three-d acceleration!
You've got problems, we all know what it's like not being able to develop on windows - but you can't seem to give up counterstrike! Notepad carriage return issues, archaic command line functions, the works - all gone in a jiffy with Virtualbox(tm)!
Want to pwn noobs from the comfort of a linux environment!? No problem. Toss xp on there, Bam! It's done!
Want to show people your awp skills while still being able to strace!? Easy as boom-headshot with virtualbox!
Call now and for no extra cost we'll throw in the latest jre for absolutely free!
Unfortunately, looks like they still haven't fixed bug 1040, or even upgraded its priority from 'minor.' The gist of it is, do not even think about touching anything in the GUI relating to the 'snapshot' feature, unless you really, absolutely, positively understand what you're doing. The wording is very confusing, and can easily lead to data loss scenarios. Unfortunately, since this is a human interface flaw, and not a programming error, it seems like it's not really being taken seriously. In my mind, sadly, this is exactly the sort of macho hacker mentality that keeps OSS from mainstream acceptance.
Ummm... for those playing along at home, you are talking about the Workstation product - which as you note, costs money.
The Server product, which is free, does not support the more interesting graphics APIs.
Cool! After the umpteenth million time of not being able to build VMware Server under the latest kernel version, and this time NOT being able to find yet-another-vmware-any patch to fix it, I finally abandoned VMware (at least for personal use) and switched back to VirtualBox. Looks like I made the right decision right, just in time.
I'm still using VMware for server virtualization at work, but for running one of Uncle Bill's products on my desktop, it looks like VirtualBox is a better solution.
I will be interested in seeing how it works with USB. That's always been a bug-a-boo for me--getting USB devices to talk to the VM. This release sounds like they've cleaned up some things. I will be really interested in how it performs with some of my games that require 3D. (I'm talking like Guild Wars, not the latest releases.)
Your Servant, B. Baggins
I got DOSBox in VirtualBox, and a copy of X-Wing, but it is tricky reading the old floppies with modern hardware. With a bit of determination, I was able to insert a mini usb plug in under the sliding metal thingy on the disk, but the computer still can't work.
At first I thought it was the host OS lacking the correct drivers, but then I realised that floppies are much slower than usb drives, so they need to operate at a lower frequency. If I could just up the frequency, I could read the data!
Okay, here are the numbers. A high speed floppy would get around 500 Kbps tops and the USB transfer is around about 29.5 Mbps, so the floppy is around 1.7% the speed of the USB. So if I increase the speed of the USB connection by 59 times, I should get the USB to read the floppy correctly. Now a microwave oven works at 2.45 Ghz, so I figured that, seeing that that is ~83 times the speed of the USB, with a little bit of duct tape and some copper foil sheilding the usb cable, I could get the increase I needed in the floppy without over doing it.
So I put the floppy with the cable inserted in it and wrapped in copper foil and duct tape into the microwave, jammed the safety switch with a plastic spoon so I could run it with the door open (don't worry, I sat behind the microwave) and plugged it into the computer. Then I quickly turned the microwave on and read the data coming from the cable.
It didn't work first time, but that was because the USB wasn't acting like a drive, so the computer could "read" it. Unfortunately it was so fast that it blew up the usb port (I think, it wont read my thumb stick).
So then I opened up an old flash drive (32MB) which I have filled with 0x00 and carefully attached the chip to the disk surface with a spot of hot glue. When I plugged it in, the computer recognized it as "removable media", so I again started the microwave to spin up the disk frequency. This time there was more smoke, not just from the microwave (to be expected), but also from the usb port!!!
Can anyone help me with the right number of winds of duct tape needed to slow the floppy frequency from the 41.5Mbps I am getting to the 29.6 Mbps I need? I think the extra speed is causing overload, I am running out of USB ports and I just got a nosebleed. Also, does anyone have another copy of X-Wing? Mine is a bit worn :-(
I don't therefore I'm not.
Or simply add the WineHQ repository to your software sources in Ubuntu - http://www.winehq.org/download/deb. Always up to date with the latest.