virtual machines and games
by design, a virtual machine used to be an encapsulated system – a “pc within a pc”. as far as emulation goes it was capable of displaying two dimensional graphics, stereo audio and share some cpu and ram.
the next generation of virtual machines are incredibly more powerful and prove this by running games. in a virtual machine. with hardware graphics support.
i wouldn’t believe it myself since i was running bootcamp on my macbook pro just for the purpose of gaming.
taking a closer look at the specifications revealed that only a couple of games are capable of running in a virtual machine and that this is mostly uncharted territory – so let’s be adventurous. 
i downloaded the 30 trial version of parallels desktop for mac from their website, installed it, installed my windows xp sp2 cd in a matter of about 60 minutes and started to install games.
it was necessary to configure the virtual machine via edit>virtual machine>video>enable directx shaders to make it use directx functionality and i tweaked the video memory to 64megabytes. if you have loads of ram (2GB+) i suggest giving the virtual machine about 1024mb – this will speed up loading times immensely.
as it turned out, games i really wanted to play like flatout 2 suffered from extreme screen corruption – which i found out later was because of directx 9.0. the virtual machines usually support directx up to 8.0 (parallels) or 8.1 (vmware fusion). but they all work well with opengl.
the next thing i tried was the orange box, a set of fairly new games which should work in parallels (i looked that up in blogs and forums).
most people were talking about half-life 2, but since this was tested everywhere i wanted to give portal and team fortress 2 a shot.
since the update is still running on tf2 here are a couple of shots of portal.
it really works!
in a virtual machine!
with hardware acceleration!
yeah, it does run a little choppy at times, but it still works.
especially the portal-part of portal 
seems to bring the underlying technology to it’s knees, but i found out that this is only the case with two portals placed fairly close to eachother.
some screen flicker happens sometimes too, but this should be fine with the next driver releases.
here are the screenshots.
i will post a movie when i can get my hands on a video camera. the only cam i have is the built-in isight cam…
Tags: macbook pro, macosx, orange box, parallels, portal, team fortress 2, virtual machine