Reply 40 of 44, by ruthan
- Rank
- Oldbie
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).
Im old goal oriented goatman, i care about facts and freedom, not about egos+prejudices. Hoarding=sickness. If you want respect, gain it by your behavior. I hate stupid SW limits, SW=virtual world, everything should be possible if you have enough raw HW.