MS Virtual PC - FREE

Microsoft has released Virtual PC 2004 for free

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/default.mspx

They also say they are releasing a version compatible with Vista.

http://blogs.msdn.com/Virtual_PC_Guy/

My first impressions when I read about this was that Vista is not going to be as compatible as XP was on previous pre XP apps.

i'm getting farther and farther out of the loop... will someone explain to me (sans the MS evanglizing and hype) why i would need this...

serious, what's it for...

--Mike

You got me there Mike; I more or less grasp the concept of what it does, but why I'd want to go there is not all that clear yet.

Maybe they are not explaining it too well? Maybe it's a solution looking for a problem? <shrug>

Why dont you just read the so called FAQ, instead of posting useless comments

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_PC

cool, i can play my old MS-dos games :)

Well you can if you have DosBox.

LMAO, that was great!

"Here is software, he is name, here is links to some info"

Bystander:"What is it? <ignoring links, ignoring obvious connection to internet, ignoring internet's vast resources at the tip of finger, ignoring google>"

[wipes tear from eye] awwww, that was a great laugh, you guys crack me up!

Somewhat related to this: VMWare has also released their VMWare server product for free.

(VirtualPC & VMWare are both very nice, in that you can use them to play old DOS and Win9x games that aren't XP compatible, in a virtual Win98 environment.

You can also use it as a sandbox to try new programs and such, before you install it on your 'real' operating system. Windows keeps running much smoother if you don't install/test/uninstall all kind of useless stuff, after all.

I was hoping this was the OS X version of Virtual PC, but it's the Windows one. The Mac version is still $130 ( http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/AppleStore?productLearnMore=T9722LL/A ). :-(

Guess I'll have to wait till I upgrade my Mac to an intel one. Maybe the rumored MacBook Gamer will be out by then. :-/

Cheers,

Ragnar

Sooper, I have a lot of old Software I would like to use and abuse again and this may allow me to do it :)

Downloading it now got me old DOS, WIn95, WIn98 and OS2 disk ready :)

Cheers and thanks for the link

Garion

don't laugh too hard at it DH... it's a stupid response if i ever heard one...

did you have to read the FAQ to know what other MS products were supposed to do...

Word, Office, Visual BASIC, Windows, Halo... ya sorta got the idea of what the thing was to be used for without having to delve into the babble of blogs, faqs, and dumb replys on various forums...

you go to the store, ya see something labeled Milk... you pretty much know what it's all about...

you go to the movies... BATMAN Begins is the title... ya pretty much got an idea, right off the *bat* what it is...

now, i understand that on the planet TroM comes from, you ask for Milk, you get roast chicken... you go into the theatre to see the DaVinci code, you wind up watching Clerks II... you see a press release for Word Processor 2.0, and ya need to read a faq before you realize that it is video game software...

so i'll just ask TroM to be patient with us humans who live on planet earth... forgive us if we expect the name of something to at least have some relavance to what it actually does...

Virtual PC 2004... haha...
what the hell does dat mean... is it a Mac utility to run a PC in a box on your Mac or what...

--Mike

Heh, this is cool to tinker with, currently installin Win98 (after spending ages finding the damned disc)...wonder if it's fast enough to play my old games on compared to say, DOS-BOX.

[EDIT] Better disable networkin for it when it finishes installing, just had a weird feeling that having a virus on a virtual machine kinda defeats the whole purpose.

a cheap pc with an old video card, running msdos and an earlier version of windows, would probably be my preferred option...

but then again, i never much cared for dual booting stuff either...

--Mike

Dont think I could stand my Pentium 100mhz's 32mb of ram though in this day and age.

i dunno... you'd be surprised to see that it runs the old stuff just as fast as the newer more powerful machines run the new, more bloated stuff...

the old games will run just fine...

--Mike

Don't know what yer deal is Red... Yer just getting old I suppose. I mean... Virtual... PC. It's a PC that's virtual. YAY!

I've used it extensively in the past to install linux on so I didn't have to play the dual boot crap (and no I don't feel like having multiple machines on hand for it either). It's a great little software sandbox that keeps everything you want to play with isolated from your normal system, and does it at a decent speed to boot.

Now go download the thing and play with it. :)

Currently I'm using Windows NT 4 SP6a inside Virtual PC and it's tootling along very well :) - It took longer to find my dusty old CD than it did to install.

Now I can install my old fave MS PhotoPaint which doesn't work on XP because its the release 1 version and good old MS didn't do a patch to release 2 of the software which worked on XP.

Also I can now install 98 and 2000 and have the perfect software testing environment, cool.

Neat thing is, I can copy the VHD file just incase I kill (or a virus) kills of windows and 10 seconds later I can be back up and runing.

This is nice.....am able to play Quake1 full-speed in Win98's DOS mode under this program...screw DOS-BOX, I'm using this for my oldies.
(now to figure out how the heck to setup the emulated sound-card & my CD-rom in DOS again....)

It's been a while since I've used either VMWare of VirtualPC. How good is the video emulation? I mean, is it at the stage where I could install a modern distribution of Linux inside a virtual machine and have 3D hardware acceleration?

I've been wondering the exact same thing. From what I've read however, you can't use the gfx card on your real PC - all you get is the standard (presumably emulated in CPU?) graphics chipset, which was some really old gfx card (S3 Virge?), and presumably will run like a dog...

Bah...
I would have found it useful if they made the Mac version free.
I'm still trying to a VPC to simulate a Linux environment.
Only to create a Linux version of my BMax apps.
But somehow there's a curse on me when it comes to Linux :(

Pretty much, Daikatana ran at a good 5fps. ;P
(was the closest game I could grab.........shutup)

According to the wiki Boomboom linked us too...

Now I dont know if that applies to all versions of the VPC, or which OS you have emulated.....but it dont matter to me as 200mhz is more then enough for any DOS game out there.

NO!!!... ok, maybe... but not today...

--Mike

LOL, THANK YOU! See Red, it's not labeled 'milk', its appropriately labeled 'Virtual PC' because that's what it is! How else are they supposed to name it?

Hmm, so what does DOSBox emulate? I thought VPC was a bit more powerful than that...

Virtual PC will not run some DOS games that DOSBOX will. Such as Eye of the Beholder 2, it will crash Virtual PC but works great in DOSBox.

I have found Virtual PC great for business end of it, not games. I test my setup from network, I test my CD autorun (create ISO and mount it) without burning CDs, I test my detection of .net and other 3rd party resources, etc.

It is a great product for developers to get at least 80% of the bugs out of any business app, installation packages, and some out of games. It does not have 3d hw in it, so it is emulated and it is SLOW.

Oohhh, and you don't need to copy your HDD file to "save it". You can enable "undo disk" on it and it will only comit changes if you say so, otherwise, when you exit, you can undo all of your changes. Better have lots of fast HDD. I run mine on a seperate WD Raptor 10K hdd.

P.S. You can launch many Virtual PCs at the same time, so you can test a web app, server to server communication, web server setup, etc. Just have enough ram and fast enough CPU. Each emulates its own NIC and your router will detect it just like any regular PC.

funny... i never had a problem figuring out what DOSBOX was supposed to be... it's name pretty much said it all...

Virtual PC... HAH!!! they might as well had called it Virtual Milk...

--Mike

/me falls on the floor laughing.

lol Red, stop hanging on to the argument bud, you know perfectly well that virtual pc is the best name anyone could come up with for it.

:)

what about Multi-OS... Virtual Runtime... LegacyDOS... just to name a few...

ya know, something a lil more descriptive of what it actual is does...

--Mike

Yeh you're right. VirtualPC is better than all of those ideas. Maybe VirtualOS is about the only better name I can think of... although it doesn't really sum up the operation of the program as absolutely.

Lets just agree to disagree lol. Emulating a PC is hard to name so that everyone understands what it does (as in emulate a pc).

agree to disagree... whats dat...

:)

well, MS has already settled on a name, and most people here seem to find no problem with it... so you must be right about the whole name thing...

that's not gonna change my mind on it though... but i must conceed the point to you...

dumb dumbs... :)

--Mike

Everyone that 'gets' it is a dumb dumb..? =]