My understanding was that you used virtualization for it's security. The more access your VM has to the outside world, then the more chances that if your VM comes into contact with some form of malware that it will be able to take root on your actual hardware, which is why VM's emulate everything. If some form of malware should take control of your VM, you just shut it down and the malware goes away, no real harm done. Giving a VM access to your physical hardware is asking for trouble, IMHO.

Yea security is very important. Also convinience and being able to quickly make a snapshot or things like that.

Maybe these "hardware" features are optional / need to be enabled? Like with XP Mode you can pass-through the internet connection and catch a virus that way.

But yea you raise a good point...

http://www.virtualbox.org/

Got to try this! Man I didn't even know this existed. It's free and works on Linux, Windows or OS X!

Ps: My current intel board doesn't have PCI, IDE and FDD anymore. My previous AM3 board did have PCI and IDE, but no FDD port.

Can you guys imagine that in 20 years from now the new generation of VOGONS members will be hunting eBay for PCI mainboards 😁

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Yea security is very important. Also convinience and being able to quickly make a snapshot or things like that. […]
Show full quote

Yea security is very important. Also convinience and being able to quickly make a snapshot or things like that.

Maybe these "hardware" features are optional / need to be enabled? Like with XP Mode you can pass-through the internet connection and catch a virus that way.

But yea you raise a good point...

http://www.virtualbox.org/

Got to try this! Man I didn't even know this existed. It's free and works on Linux, Windows or OS X!

Ps: My current intel board doesn't have PCI, IDE and FDD anymore. My previous AM3 board did have PCI and IDE, but no FDD port.

Can you guys imagine that in 20 years from now the new generation of VOGONS members will be hunting eBay for PCI mainboards 😁

In 20 years people may be looking for the fastest boards still supporting PCI (for use with one of those awesome retro PCI X-Fi's 😜 ) and one of those ancient fossilized floppy drives 😜

Personally I somewhat doubt Preshot will be receiving much love by then, unless the board won't work with Conroe.

Tetrium wrote:

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Yea security is very important. Also convinience and being able to quickly make a snapshot or things like that. […]
Show full quote

Yea security is very important. Also convinience and being able to quickly make a snapshot or things like that.

Maybe these "hardware" features are optional / need to be enabled? Like with XP Mode you can pass-through the internet connection and catch a virus that way.

But yea you raise a good point...

http://www.virtualbox.org/

Got to try this! Man I didn't even know this existed. It's free and works on Linux, Windows or OS X!

Ps: My current intel board doesn't have PCI, IDE and FDD anymore. My previous AM3 board did have PCI and IDE, but no FDD port.

Can you guys imagine that in 20 years from now the new generation of VOGONS members will be hunting eBay for PCI mainboards 😁

In 20 years people may be looking for the fastest boards still supporting PCI (for use with one of those awesome retro PCI X-Fi's 😜 ) and one of those ancient fossilized floppy drives 😜

Personally I somewhat doubt Preshot will be receiving much love by then, unless the board won't work with Conroe.

I don't think any Pentium with a 4 after it is going to be a popular retro rig.The performance is too low relative to a comparable AMD chip and the heat output is too high. The Athlon/Athlon XP/and Athlon 64 will be popular.

Hard to say. I think the line will be drawn between W98/XP and Vista / W7. Just like we do tend to get the "best (whatever that is)" parts for a W98 machine, future retro lovers (what a word) will lkely do the same and maybe go with a Core 2 or Phenom 2?

Because all the old PCIe video cards (6800GT and higher) should work fine in these boards (and even in the current ones...)

Also:

Been playing for the first time with VirtualBox (a free VM from Oracle). It's quite good. I created a 512MB virtual HDD, fdisked it, formated with DOS 6.22.

Then had to load it with games, so I booted another VM with a Ubuntu Live CD AND the 512MB FAT16 drive. That way I could just copy the games over.

Then I ran the games and I couldn't believe it. It plays Sound Blaster sound effects 😳

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ-xPVUcOEM

With PCI passthrough working and graphics passthrough also in the works, we can soon enjoy our W98 games on brand spanking new hardware!

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Hard to say. I think the line will be drawn between W98/XP and Vista / W7. Just like we do tend to get the "best (whatever that […]
Show full quote

Hard to say. I think the line will be drawn between W98/XP and Vista / W7. Just like we do tend to get the "best (whatever that is)" parts for a W98 machine, future retro lovers (what a word) will lkely do the same and maybe go with a Core 2 or Phenom 2?

Because all the old PCIe video cards (6800GT and higher) should work fine in these boards (and even in the current ones...)

Also:

Been playing for the first time with VirtualBox (a free VM from Oracle). It's quite good. I created a 512MB virtual HDD, fdisked it, formated with DOS 6.22.

Then had to load it with games, so I booted another VM with a Ubuntu Live CD AND the 512MB FAT16 drive. That way I could just copy the games over.

Then I ran the games and I couldn't believe it. It plays Sound Blaster sound effects 😳

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ-xPVUcOEM

With PCI passthrough working and graphics passthrough also in the works, we can soon enjoy our W98 games on brand spanking new hardware!

This is interesting. I wonder if through the use of a VM you can use hardware that you normally wouldn't be able to use on a particular machine, like if I wanted to play a 3D game on a machine with only ISA or VL Bus slots, can I run a VM that emulates a 3D accelerated video card and play games in the VM even though my system has no real 3D video card?

Here the direct link to the DX11 emulation demo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtmwnx-k2qg&fe … player_embedded

So this PC has two video cards. And the VM (ZEN) runs two instances of an OS. And each OS runs that DX11 benchmark.

I think that's just unreal!!!

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Here the direct link to the DX11 emulation demo: […]
Show full quote

Here the direct link to the DX11 emulation demo:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtmwnx-k2qg&fe … player_embedded

So this PC has two video cards. And the VM (ZEN) runs two instances of an OS. And each OS runs that DX11 benchmark.

I think that's just unreal!!!

The stress put on the video cards must be enormous. Running a single instance of a high end benchmark program is bad enough but running two at once must be murder. They'd probably burn up those cards if they tried that with Furmark with all settings turned up to the max.

Sorry I didn't express myself too well here...

The machine has two cards, and each card runs one benchmark. So that machine runs two virtual machines with one card per virtual machine.

Two computers basically. So you could play a game on one machine and watch a movie on the other one (but using a single physical machine)

Pretty cool right?

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

With PCI passthrough working and graphics passthrough also in the works, we can soon enjoy our W98 games on brand spanking new hardware!

Except everyone would insist on using old and crappy hardware because the new stuff wouldn't "feel" the same and be unable to "transport" you back ten years, amirite? 😜

sliderider wrote:

This is interesting. I wonder if through the use of a VM you can use hardware that you normally wouldn't be able to use on a particular machine, like if I wanted to play a 3D game on a machine with only ISA or VL Bus slots, can I run a VM that emulates a 3D accelerated video card and play games in the VM even though my system has no real 3D video card?

...What kind of machine could run a VM (VMs being fairly demanding applications) but only have ISA or VL Bus slots, and why would you want to use it?

You only get decent performance out of a virtual machine if you use paravirtualisation - that requires a modern cpu with virtualisation hardware (Core-ish / Athlon X2-ish onwards).

You won't get anything decent out of a machine with ISA or VL-bus 😁

Looks like the 'pci passthrough' option mentioned here is only supported on hardware with AMD Vi or Intel VT-d features (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_vt#Hardware_assist).

Jorpho wrote:

Except everyone would insist on using old and crappy hardware because the new stuff wouldn't "feel" the same and be unable to "t […]
Show full quote

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

With PCI passthrough working and graphics passthrough also in the works, we can soon enjoy our W98 games on brand spanking new hardware!

Except everyone would insist on using old and crappy hardware because the new stuff wouldn't "feel" the same and be unable to "transport" you back ten years, amirite? 😜

sliderider wrote:

This is interesting. I wonder if through the use of a VM you can use hardware that you normally wouldn't be able to use on a particular machine, like if I wanted to play a 3D game on a machine with only ISA or VL Bus slots, can I run a VM that emulates a 3D accelerated video card and play games in the VM even though my system has no real 3D video card?

...What kind of machine could run a VM (VMs being fairly demanding applications) but only have ISA or VL Bus slots, and why would you want to use it?

Well, I do have two Nexgen motherboard that have only ISA/VL Bus slots. It would be nice to run a VM that emulates a 3D video card so I can play some games on them other than solitaire and minesweeper.

I think the next big thing is plugins for video cards (rather than PCI passthrough) and virtual CRTs with emulated simulated screen quirks

sliderider wrote:

I don't think any Pentium with a 4 after it is going to be a popular retro rig.The performance is too low relative to a comparable AMD chip and the heat output is too high. The Athlon/Athlon XP/and Athlon 64 will be popular.

Socket 423 2.0Ghz Willamette with RAMBUS! 😁

And in the far future, I'd say a very wanted retro rig would be the Conroe 😁

And it will be either single core or non-single core retro rig? 😜

Edit:Otoh, when looking back from the future, P3 is the winner compared to Thunderbird, especially if you consider that any Pentium 3 will run cooler then most Thunderbirds (and on top of that, P3 supports SSE while Thunderbird does not).
Theres 2 drawbacks for P3 though:
-Even though the Intel chipsets are basically the best ones to get, they are hurt by the artificial 512MB RAM limit Intel placed upon them and the only way around that is by either using a RAMBUS P3, going BX or by picking a non-Intel chipset.
-Thunderbirds can be unlocked with a pencil 😁

Comparing Conroe to A64, I'd say Conroe is the winner here. It's faster, has the Intel chipset and runs a bit cooler (especially if you don't go the Venice route). Imo the A64 boards prior to AM2 were really a step-up compared to XP.
One advantage A64's do have is the good availability of AGP boards and the fact that (as the Intel boards can be damaged due to their onboard pins) the AMD boards are less likely to be bought second hand damaged

megatron-uk wrote:

Looks like the 'pci passthrough' option mentioned here is only supported on hardware with AMD Vi or Intel VT-d features (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_vt#Hardware_assist).

Yup! AMD is pretty good with this, I think most of their CPUs (apart from Sempron) tick the box. With Intel you need to pick the right one. My i5 2400 does have this feature, it was something I made sure to have because I think this topic is getting interesting soon!

The thing is I haven't seen a lot of development regarding drivers for win9x virtual machines. You need a video card driver for the VM, and someone would have to write one for win9x. It also would necessitate AMD and NVIDIA write drivers for the 9x platform, which I'm not sure is going to happen.

What this does potentially allow is gaming on Linux via video card passthrough to a WinXP or Win7 VM.

How far will this go though. Is my retro collection which I paid for going to be worth nothing in the future. Who wants a PIII or Pentium retro rig when they can just throw whatever modern cpu and video card they want at it and use a glide wrapper?

SavantStrike wrote:

I hope this doesn't go too far, all my retro hardware is going to be worth nothing. Who wants a PIII or Pentium retro rig when they can just throw whatever modern cpu and video card they want at it and use a glide wrapper?

I wouldn't worry about it.

Console and Home Computer emulation is pretty much perfect, yet still fetch good prices. Pretty much all XT games run perfect in DOSBox, yet people spend fortunes to build a real XT/AT.

In terms of emulation: IMO it's a trend that you can't stop because it's a huge market.

Just look at what GOG.com does. Nintendo is now also selling games (C64, PC Engine, NES, SNES...) on the Wii and at some point they will look at their old games and want to make some more money out of it.

Sometimes you don't even need emulation. The Lucasarts adventures on Steam run on a totally new Windows interpreter.

I also see a good marketing opportunity for Nvidia or ATI. Imagine a 4200TI or 6800GT in your favourite VM? IMO that's the kind of marketing that money can't buy...

sliderider wrote:

Well, I do have two Nexgen motherboard that have only ISA/VL Bus slots. It would be nice to run a VM that emulates a 3D video card so I can play some games on them other than solitaire and minesweeper.

Aren't those just supposed to sit in a box somewhere and look nice? 😜

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Pretty much all XT games run perfect in DOSBox, yet people spend fortunes to build a real XT/AT.

Not very many people, and out of those that do, I don't think a lot of them are particularly interested in using it for games.

Sometimes you don't even need emulation. The Lucasarts adventures on Steam run on a totally new Windows interpreter.

If you don't want to call that emulation, it's still a colossal feat of reverse-engineering and re-writing if you don't have the original source code on hand.

Imagine a 4200TI or 6800GT in your favourite VM? IMO that's the kind of marketing that money can't buy...

The market for people who would want a feature like that is so infinitesimal in the grand scheme that I doubt they would have much to gain. (They could make a much bigger splash by releasing an open source Linux video driver, if they wanted to.)