3d hardware acceleration on VMWare (3DMark 2001, nature scene)
16#VMware #OpenGL #DirectX
3d benchmarking on VMWare player with 3DMark 2001 and enjoying the demo including the famous 'Nature scene'.
Enable D3D support in Virtual Machine that has been ' powered off ', but NOT suspended or still running!
Add the following to the configuration (.vmx) file for the virtual machine:
mks.enable3d = TRUE
This line enables accelerated 3-D on the host. It is required to support accelerated 3-D in the guest and also enables the host to accelerate 2-D portions of the guest display.
svga.vramSize = 67108864
This line increases the amount of VRAM on the virtual display card to 64 MB. Adding more VRAM helps to reduce thrashing in the guest. The maximum value is 128 MB.
vmmouse.present = FALSE
This line disables the absolute pointing device in the guest. Applications which require DirectInput relative mode need to turn off the absolute pointing device in the guest. In practice, this is only required for a certain class of full screen 3-D applications (for example, real-time games like first-person shooters).
If you do set the vmmouse.present option, you should also turn off the preference for motion ungrabbing in the Input tab of the Preferences settings dialog.
To turn off ungrabbing for vmouse.present:
-Choose Edit and then Preferences.
-Click Input.
-Deselect Ungrab when cursor leaves window.
Unlocking 3D hardware from within a virtual machine is very possible and has been implemented more or less in various VM software packages.
-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. 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 Apple Mac side (VMWare Fusion) 3D support is more solid and access to it has been built-into the GUI 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.
My Behind the scenes and extras Facebook Page:
https://www.facebook.com/LactobacillusPrimeRetroGaming