About PCem, go to their forum, because they not care about MacOS if there are not MacOS users to test and report.

Graphics calls virtualization is on bad shape because:
1) Graphics cards are most complex devices in our PCs
2) There is not any Win9x / XP era graphics 3D card with fully released detailed design documents to just emulate it from scratch, except 3Dfx Voodoo which leaked or were published, or not too complex to reverse engineer it - i dunno details.
3) When you create own virtual GPU with is not copy of existing real card (which already existed drivers), you need own drivers for it and again, graphics drivers are most complex to do.. Even very big companies had lots of issues with it in the past.. and now only Nvidia and AMD can do that, even Intel is failing a lot. So it would need really big community effort to make it happen.

So far best but not great solutions are really:
1) PCem for 95% of users (Win+Linux) and for early Win9x games only it can emulate max K6-2 250 MHz + Voodoo 2 SLI on fastest todays CPUs - i tried it on Core i9 9900K.
2) Qemu + 3Dfx patch + Wrapper (Win + Linux only probably)- but its Glide only and very user unfriendly (Qemu + 1 more level), build and pray - Topic 60950
3) QEMU + KVM video card pass through on Linux. There were small chance that MS or Apple will has some pass through possiblity to their OSes kernels.

Because 3dfx and Kyro were i thigh both bought by Nvidia, S3 by VIA, there is not really any big company from which you would be able to licence whole videocard designs except Nvidia and AMD. Only maybe Matrox - but they have solutions only for Win9X and XP, later they gave up gamers market. Nvidia has own virtualization business.. so probably will not just give their staff for free or sell to competition ( Vmware).

ruthan wrote on 2020-05-07, 14:24:

About PCem, go to their forum, because they not care about MacOS if there are not MacOS users to test and report. […]
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About PCem, go to their forum, because they not care about MacOS if there are not MacOS users to test and report.

Graphics calls virtualization is on bad shape because:
1) Graphics cards are most complex devices in our PCs
2) There is not any Win9x / XP era graphics 3D card with fully released detailed design documents to just emulate it from scratch, except 3Dfx Voodoo which leaked or were published, or not too complex to reverse engineer it - i dunno details.
3) When you create own virtual GPU with is not copy of existing real card (which already existed drivers), you need own drivers for it and again, graphics drivers are most complex to do.. Even very big companies had lots of issues with it in the past.. and now only Nvidia and AMD can do that, even Intel is failing a lot. So it would need really big community effort to make it happen.

So far best but not great solutions are really:
1) PCem for 95% of users (Win+Linux) and for early Win9x games only it can emulate max K6-2 250 MHz + Voodoo 2 SLI on fastest todays CPUs - i tried it on Core i9 9900K.
2) Qemu + 3Dfx patch - but its Glide only and very user unfriendly (Qemu + 1 more level), build and pray - Topic 60950
3) QEMU + KVM video card pass through on Linux. There were small chance that MS or Apple will has some pass through possiblity to their OSes kernels.

Because 3dfx and Kyro were i thigh both bought by Nvidia, S3 by VIA, there is not really any big company from which you would be able to licence whole videocard designs except Nvidia and AMD. Only maybe Matrox - but they have solutions only for Win9X and XP, later they gave up gamers market. Nvidia has own virtualization business.. so probably will not just give their staff for free or sell to competition ( Vmware).

I see... so things are pretty much, uh... fu**ed. Anyway, I don't need THAT much power from graphics. I gave up on rFactor (1 and 2) when I decided to leave hackintosh scene and go back to a macbook. I love racing games, I'm also a kart racer in real life, I used to do online leagues in rFactor, but now I am a bit old for these things plus some leagues are not racing on weekends anymore, so none fits my schedule. I simply decided to quit. Then I decided to do some offline racing and for that thing, for some casual F1, I thought that GP2, GP3 or GP4 games would be good enough.

Turns out I can play GP2 on both 3.1 and 98 machines, even GP3 is playable on 2000. But GP4 is unplayable between 2000 and XP. In XP vmware, its ridiculously slow even in a fresh install. I can run on Win 7, but I need to switch to 10 because of another problem. All other games I have (DOS Games, Full Throttle, Championship Manager series, FIFA 99, NFS II) are all playable from 2000 and below.

Only Flight Simulator 98, GP4 and NR2003 (I might be missing one or other game, but that's it) needs more power. And I'm heading them to win 10...

Well there is one more chance Wine - there is MacOS port - https://wiki.winehq.org/MacOS on Wine it works quite well for i dunno 1/2 of games and advantage is that is usually working even for old games.

I like cars games too - especially Carmageddon 😀 Ok, Ignition and Quarantine are car games too 😀

ruthan wrote on 2020-05-07, 21:56:

Well there is one more chance Wine - there is MacOS port - https://wiki.winehq.org/MacOS on Wine it works quite well for i dunno 1/2 of games and advantage is that is usually working even for old games.

I like cars games too - especially Carmageddon 😀 Ok, Ignition and Quarantine are car games too 😀

I did try Wineskin Winery. Worked like a treat for Counter-Strike 1.6 and one or two more Steam games (RACE07/GTR EVo) and for C'ship Manager 3.

Not so great for all my other games though. GP4 runs, but without being able to run the editors/mods, it's no fun. For example, ZAZ GP4 Tools patches the game on the fly for each mod I want to run. I think that Apple's stupid gatekeeper and apps notarization are part of the problem.

Edit: Just tried Parallels. It's in a dire state now. Windows 2000 Parallels Video adapter gives me 256mb, which should be good enough to run GP4. But it crashes all the time. While VMWare Fusion, per documentation, should give me 128mb on SVGA II for windows 2000, but can only achieve 64mb. A real shambles.

Have any of you played with Dosemu2 yet?

It's kind of a resurrection of the old Dosemu project, which was more or less the Linux equivalent of NTVDM, which allowed DOS code to run natively in a v8086 instance.

Since v8086 mode isn't available in a 64-bit operating system, Dosemu won't work on such systems (or it will fall back to CPU emulation, in which case you're better off using DOSBox or PCem anyway, since those emulators do a much better job at that).

Dosemu2 is a rewrite that instead leverages the KVM hypervisor in the Linux kernel, which allows 16-bit DOS code to still run natively (or at least without CPU emulation) by leveraging the hardware-assisted virtualization features on newer Intel and AMD CPUs. Judging from the age of the most recent commits and the chatter in the issue tracker on GitHub, this project seems to have a much higher focus on DOS game support and proper sound card emulation than other virtualization solutions.

• https://dosemu2.github.io/dosemu2/
• https://github.com/dosemu2

You'd have to run Linux to play with it, though. But hey, if you can get it to work with nested virtualization, I guess you can run a paravirtualized Linux VM on Windows, and then run a nested hardware-assisted Dosemu2 VM within the Linux VM. 😉

By the way, if this issue in WSL2 gets resolved, then nested KVM sessions will become possible in Windows out-of-the-box:
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4193