Very nice, although you kept saying "VMWare" as if it's just one program and not the Player and the Server (which requires one to bother getting a free registration). Is Virtual PC 200X just one combined program without any (free) registration?

Now can you also rank them by Windows 9X?:happy:

Win 9x -
VMWare and VPC are about equal, although the networking capabilities in VMWare, as it relates to the host, are more bountiful. VMWare is also a tad bit faster than VPC. This assumes their virtual HDD is IDE which is not as optimized as the virtual SCSI disk option (available on both Server products and VMWare Workstation). However, I like VPC more *for Windows 98*. 'Hard to say why. It just seems more solid. Maybe because the underlying DOS VM support is better.

DOSBox - forget it.

And I forgot.... Parallels - still buggy IMO. Sound and DOS support is worse than all three other options. Parallels does okay with Win98 though. If they fix all their complaints, the next major release version will be a big contender in the virtual desktop (not Server) market.

VMWare player, Server or Workstation doesn't matter for compatibility, although the Server products might not quite be as useful for interactive use. Not sure if MS Virtual Server has SB16 sound or not. ??

Robert

Edit: VMWare has USB and other support too which both DOSBox and VPC lack. None do DirectX games at all. VMWare has experimental support, but forget about it. If you need DirectX support, you can probably run it natively on whatever version of Windows you have handy.

VPC/Vmware support DirectX games just fine. They just don't support D3D/OGL/Glide.

Vmware Server works just as well as Vmware Workstation for playing games. The interface is the same Vmware Workstation except you have the option of a web interface. With MS Virtual Server 2005 you only have the web interface. Only MS Virtual Server 2005 doesn't have sound support.

I've worked with DOSBox (official 0.65) and VMWare (both Server, Player and Workstation), and I prefer DOSBox (much faster than VMWare, thanks to VGA emulation of VMWare).

On the other side, I'll take VMWare as my preferred way of executing virtual Windows (I've got a virtual Windows 2000 server). Some thoughts about VMWare:
- You don't need VMWare Server AND Player. If you've got premade virtual machines, you can use VMWare Player. If you plan to make your own machines, use Server (free) or Workstation ($$$).
- In VMWare you can choose IDE o SCSI hard disk (Win9x machines will choose IDE by default, WinNT or Linux machines will choose SCSI by default), but I've not managed to disable the SCSI controller of the virtual machine (any help?).
- You can drag and drop files between the host and the virtual machine with VMWare Workstation, but not with the player nor the server. Shared folders works only in Workstation, too.
- VMWare can make a direct connection to USB, serial and parallel devices.
- VMWare have DirectX support by default, but not Direct3D.
- There are two "hidden" features in the virtual machine definition files. Editing by hand, you can enable SB16 support and enable Direct3D support. Direct3D support is experimental and could destroy all humans if you try it. There are some docs in internet about enabling that.
- I don't like VMWare performance without VMWare tools. That's why I prefer DOSBox when I play Operation: Inner Space.

Are there any emulator that supports OS/2?

VPC supports OS/2.

I think VirtualPC is perhaps the better "real" PC emulator compared to VMWare. But VMWare shines on operating systems it directly supports with VMWare Tools. VPC emulates an S3 Trio64 video adapter which makes it easier to run in non-supported OS's. The SB16 option of VMWare is used in my DOS example above, and still doesn't work as well as the SB16 in VPC.

-Robert

DOSFreak, you are right as always on my points that I missed. It's been awhile since I played with either Server product.

You are missing one big feature of Dosbox that none of the big ones have:
Dosbox runs Windows 3.x without a need to boot an image. That is a very big difference and something I really like about Dosbox.
Another feature that I miss in the big ones is the Dos/Windows 3.x support. What I mean is, if you got a problem with running GAMES you are able to get help here (and even help in getting general Windows 3.x things running). Of course you may get grumpy replies but there is almost always someone pointing you to a solution. The big ones (at least VPC) will only say that Dos/Windows 3.x is not their real target and they are sorry that they can't help you further.

How is joystick support in VPC and VMWARE? Do they support the 2axis/4buttons thing?

And why is the freeware (is it open source?) QEMU left out of all of this? Is it any good? I understand it's a command line utility like DOSBox.

Probably no one thought of it and/or the OP didn't test it.

But Dosbox isn't a command line utility (only the program itself looks like Dos, hence a bit like the command line) 😀

If DOSBox isn't a command line program, I don't know what is...it has no GIU. That's why people create frontends for it and why its forums are flooded with newbies who are clueless on how to launch games with it.

I have played with QEMU/KQEMU on both Windows & Linux. Perhaps it's my after-Christmas fog, but I didn't include that either along with Parallels in my original post. I'll admit I forgot, but my subconscious thought behind it was it's a non-issue. It is neither as compatible as VPC or VMWare, and perhaps along the lines of Parallels, which is not that good either. I'll admit though that my experience with QEMU is much more limited since within in a couple days' time, it didn't impress me whatsoever compared to the competition.

I'd like to say the nice thing about QEMU (and DOSBox) is that it's free, but since VMWare and Microsoft have both released free versions of their products, that's not an incentive anymore.

Robert

Ok, so to finish it off:

Is Virtual PC 200X just one combined program without any (free) registration?

lwc wrote:

Ok, so to finish it off:

Is Virtual PC 200X just one combined program without any registration?

Yes, it is now free. It runs on Windows only.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/do … nloads/sp1.mspx

We've covered the free part. I asked if it's just 1 program (unlike VMWare Player and VMWare Server) and if it requires a registration (like VMWare Server)?

you really could have used google for this or the link valnar gave you and there click on product information.
One program and AFAIK no more registration.

The problem is most programs' sites don't say what they don't have (unless it's a small program that wants to stress it lacks bad things its big competitors have).

In any case, thanks. Seems like VirtualPC is truly more user friendly.