what happened to VirtualPC7?

Zammy-Sam

Zammy-Sam

Desertchild
If I recall correct, microsoft planed to release VPC7 by the end of may. It was supposed to be in the office 2004 professional bundle. Well, I am waiting for this bundle and have no idea how much time it will take. Any rumours?
 
It's been delayed until this fall. Aparently Microsoft had a harder time with the integration of the VPC team in to the MacBU, among other reasons.
 
Hopefully though it should be ace and is *rumored* to have GPU acceleration meaning old games will be playable and more CPU being dedicated to emulating the x86
 
I still wouldn't expect games to be 'playable', though. ;-) ... (Never get your expectations too high, anyway...)
 
i always get excited when a new VPC is released, i think its cool that you can have a mac and windows on the same computer. ......Then I use windows and realise why I use a Mac and not a pc.
 
:) ... Basically: Same here... However, I still use VPC for testing web pages and stuff on the PC side.
 
I have found XP to be surprisingly "tolerable" in VPC on a Dual G4 (1 GHZ). Performance-wise it was noticeably faster than, say, Win98. I guess I would have thought the older OSes would run faster in emulation.

And since Longhorn is miles away, that means it's XP for a while in VPC. Which also means that when I grab one of those 3GHZ G5s (or whatever they announce next) I expect XP/VPC to be quite decent indeed. And that's with no optimizations beyond the status quo.

I'm really hoping for GPU support. Given that Apple has a such a limited selection of cards, you'd think it would be a bit more realistic for the Mac VPC to support GPU processing on some level.

I don't know about games, but I don't really care about that. Any game that would be playable is probably too old to interest me. Would be neat though if they could pull it off. Too good to be true.
 
Something I would like to see (and which others mentioned before) is a desktop less emulation of Windows, like Wine. I mean I wouldn't go as far as adding osx styled title bars to windows applications, but removing the windows desktop should be possible. We already have a start menu application in the dock. If it would be improved (like sorting the entries using different criteria > date, name etc., or reflect more the real state of the "real" start menu) this should work fine.
 
i think the delay has to do with the rumored XP update coming along soon. MACBU wants to make sure it is pre-installed and works correctly.
 
I don't quite understand why they don't release the 'pro' box with VPC 6.1 and an upgrade coupon to VPC 7... Sure, that wouldn't solve G5 user's problems, but I guess people don't want to wait on Office 2004 just because of VPC?
 
I am also excited about the new virtual pc. I have a 1ghz iMac, and any kind of speed upgrade would be nice for it. It's not so much that I use it, but I occasionally like to look at new Winamp releases, use MSN Messenger on Windows (since microsoft has made the mac version seriously crippled in comparison), etc. I only have 512 mb ram so I've assigned 256 to vpc, along with 16 mb for video emulation. And I'm running Windows Xp Pro, so yes......any kind of speed upgrade at all would be a real nice suprise :rolleyes: . For as sluggish as XP is on my computer, I still think its neat when friends come over and I'm able to say, "hey look, its windows, inside a window! hahaha". Of course, that is if I'm not running it full screen :) .
 
I thought Microsoft had said that it wasn't going to be updating VP6 now or in the near future. Is this incorrect?
 
It would be darn stupid to not update VPC, Natobasso. MS bought it from Connectix some time ago and why would they just delete this project? It should be released soon.
And jonmichael23, I am wondering how ppl can waste their money so easily. ;) If you spent $249 on software just to test msn and winamp from time to time, I can simply die of jealousy..
 
Well, we are talking about Microsoft here, right?! :) I am just reporting what I heard. Maybe what I actually heard was they either weren't in a hurry to update it (for us 3-5%ers who have seen the light) or they were having trouble getting an update out due to the requirements of OS X.
 
Why would they just delete this project? Well they sure as heck killed the OS/2 version of VPC which had practically just been released when MS bought it off Connectix -- and the OS/2 version was probably 99% Windows version code with some emulation libraries. It would be much, much easier and less expensive for them to keep the OS/2 version going than it is to develop it for a whole different hardware/software platform like MacOS X. MS rarely "plays fair" in operating system support.

On another note, since VPC7 is still not available for MacOS and since some here have already commented on general VPC6 performance they see, I'd like to ask (as a Mac newbie) what kind of performance I might expect from 6.1. I'd be running it on a PowerMac G4 1.25 DP with a gig of RAM and Panther. I'd only be using it as an interim solution until I find/afford Mac equivalents for some of my current Win2K programs: Shareaza p2p, a couple of old DOS games which I guess I could run in DosBox, Nero Burning ROM for CD/DVD burning (not sure how well that would work under emulation anyway), and some video file format converters (to Mac-ize some AVI/WMV/ASF files that don't have codecs for Mac). I would not be using VPC for the long-term.

I guess in all of that, the real question is "is VPC6.1 dual-processor aware?" Will having 2 CPUs benefit me at all over the person who's running on a 1GHz single CPU system?

Thanks!
 
I don't quite get this (later) discussion. We all know MS is going to release VPC7 soon... So where's the problem? Where does the believe it's not going to be updated come from?
 
You might want to hold out on the file-converting stuff, Freiheit - that's processor intensive, and would take a bloody week on VPC.

VPC6.1 runs happily for non-processor intensive tasks. I generally use it for openCanvas 1.1 (a tablet-painting program, yet unrivalled on either the Mac or PC, including Photoshop and Painter) and for Solitaire (I wish I could find an adequate (hopefully IDENTICAL) port of Windows Solitaire), under Windows XP running with every nonessential service switched off. It runs quite happily, but I wish the cam would run through it better, into MSN. If it would, I wouldn't need the PC anymore.


So yeah, VPC is adequate but I wouldn't be converting AVI files.
 
Solitaire? You're kidding, right? A game where whether you win or lose is defined before you start playing?
 
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