Emulation: VMWare 3D Nature Scene

The 3D Mark 2001 Nature Scene running on VMWare.

Unlocking 3D hardware from within a virtual machine is very possible and has been implemented more or less in various VM software packages.

Add the following to the configuration (.vmx) file for the virtual machine:
mks.enable3d = TRUE
svga.vramSize = 67108864
vmmouse.present = FALSE

-Virtual Box supports 3D openGL acceleration on Linux guests but your Linux distro needs to be compatible with the 'extras' you need to install.
-VMWare supports D3D to a certain extend on Windows XP guests - I've actually made a couple of old videos showing this off. I've got an older version of 3D Mark up and running and also the game Need for Speed Hot persuit. There are quite a bit of graphics errors but it is definitely hardware accelerated. In order to 'activate' the 3D support you needed to edit one of the configuration files of a specific Virtual Machine running XP. It is cumbersome and not very compatible still. On the Mac side 3D support is more solid but I haven't run VMWare on Mac for a while.
-Virtual PC doesn't support any hardware acceleration whatsoever.
-On the Mac there's Parallels which does support 3D hardware acceleration to a greater extend actually allowing you to run games accelerated either in a Window or full screen.
-Wine / Crossover / Cider - implementations of Windows32 API allowing Linux, OSX and other OS-es running on x86 cpus to execute Windows applications. On the Macintosh Crossover games really does a great job directX 9 support D3D. Quite a few steam games actually run on Crossover Games. Games like Halflife, Outrun2006 run great. Also another Windows based racing game Toca3 runs great this way. Need for Speed hot persuit also functions rather well.
-DOSBox - great way to run older dos games. It is even possible to install Windows 3.1x and run games on it - provided you install the right drivers. I've made a little video on that as well. It is also possible to get Windows95 up and running albeit very very buggy. Made a video about that as well - quite a while ago with a link to a website providing all the information to get people started (Vogons).

So you don't necessarily need virtual machines in order to play 'older games'. There's quite a bit of software out there that might suit your needs.

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• 3d
• video
• acelleration
• vmware
• emulation

[markvergeer]

Well, it still is part emulation of graphics cards and peripherals.

[Gruelius]

whats with the shifty music? Nice to know it works tho

[n00bje]

VMWare = virtualisation, not emulation BTW