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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.
"...not something that can be used for serious gaming."
WTF?
Sorry, I didn't know I was speaking to a "professional". :-/
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.
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.
However at this point, 3D VMs seem to be an experimental playtoy, not something that can be used for serious gaming.
It makes no sense to lump OpenGL and Direct3D together as "3D" when you're talking about VirtualBix, since they are implemented in very different ways.
VirtualBox OpenGL is basically just as pass-thru to the host driver. The guest box additions includes a virtual OpenGL driver that just passes the commands thru to the the host and the real driver. There must be some performance hit, but the approach seems simple enough.
VirtualBox Direct3D is implemented using the WINE driver that converts Direct3D calls into OpenGL which then get tunneled through to the host OpenGL driver as in the OpenGL case. VirtuaBox Direct3D should therefore be similar in functionality to that in WINE. One upside to the approach is that you don't need a Windows host to have D3D guest aceleration.
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.
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.