VOGONS


First post, by Adventure4Life

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Hi there...

I have been playing with VMs of late, I am very new to it all, but mainly been using 86Box or PCem. When I first started I used VirtualBox and then latter VMware. This thread is about VMware though.

Basically VirtualBox has removed all direct 3D Support form it. I think Anything pre 6.1 still has it though. Anyway, I tried out VMware Workstation as this has 3D Acceleration still and is the only real option for Windows 10 Hosts, that I know for xp+ windows. Qemu for Windows dose not have any 3D Acceleration at all yet for the windows verison, as far as I know, and that is all the top vm stems I know of.

The Problem

In VMware there dose not seem to be any equivalent function to the VirtualBox Scale function. Like if I install windowsXP in VirtualBox and set the guest resolution to 800x600 on a 4K Monitor that is super tiny.. but there is this option called "View/Scale Mode". What is cool about this mode is that it makes scales the guest desktop, but dose not effect the guest OS.

With VMware I can only get it to scale to the Host Window Frame by physically changing the resolution of the guest Desktop. Now obviously for a number of reasons this is problematic. Still I can not for the life of me find any way to scale the Guest Host, making vmware next to usless as the text is so small and tiny I can hardly read it!

The so the problem is that VMware is the better application to play my old games as it actually has 3D Acceleration, while Vbox dose not. BUT as it can not scale, even with my monitor put to my lowest resolution it is still tiny on the screen, or running at a scaled rez and this break many full screen games and stuff. So neather is really able to be used to reto game (as far as I know)

TL:DR

How can I scale the Guest Host Monitor without changeing the Guest Host Resolution in VMware, similar to how "Scale Mode" works in Virtual Box?

a1iJR4g.jpg
This is VMWare with a 800x600 XP Desktop

1O4OyBJ.jpg
This is the same Guest after I have dragged the Host Window Frame for the VM, so it is larger. See how the resolution of the Guest has changed to match the dimensions of the Host Window Frame?

ltnlqyc.jpg
Here is a similarly scaled frame in VirtualBox... see how the guest host resolution is still 800x600? How can I get this to happen in VmWare.

Thanks!

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Reply 1 of 4, by TehGuy

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Workstation Pro has guest stretching (either free or keep aspect ratio), but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't let Player have it.

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EDIT: They didn't let Player have it

Win98+DOS: C3 Ezra-T 1.0AGHz / P3-S 1.26GHz, 128MB RAM, AWE64 + Orpheus + Audigy 2 ZS, Ti 4200, 128GB SD card
Win XP SP3: C2Q 9650, 4GB RAM, X-Fi Titanium, GTX 750
PowerMac G4 QS 800MHz + GeForce4 Ti4200, OS 9
PowerMac G5 DP 1.8Ghz + ATi x800 XT, Leopard

Reply 2 of 4, by Adventure4Life

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TehGuy wrote on 2021-10-23, 16:06:

Workstation Pro has guest stretching (either free or keep aspect ratio), but I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't let Player have it.

EDIT: They didn't let Player have it

ahhh... I see. Yeah. That is it. Was confusion the hell out of me as I guess all the examples I was looking at was using pro. I couldn't work out how they were doing it,... turns out it is a paywall feature : (

Visit my retro game review channel!! ~~ HERE ~~

Reply 3 of 4, by TehGuy

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Adventure4Life wrote on 2021-10-23, 21:45:

ahhh... I see. Yeah. That is it. Was confusion the hell out of me as I guess all the examples I was looking at was using pro. I couldn't work out how they were doing it,... turns out it is a paywall feature : (

If you're not installing things willy-nilly off the internet (and even then you'd have to be getting some strange stuff to chance getting something that'd exploit VBox's VGA driver, I would think), you could probably get away with an older version of Virtualbox for your needs.

Win98+DOS: C3 Ezra-T 1.0AGHz / P3-S 1.26GHz, 128MB RAM, AWE64 + Orpheus + Audigy 2 ZS, Ti 4200, 128GB SD card
Win XP SP3: C2Q 9650, 4GB RAM, X-Fi Titanium, GTX 750
PowerMac G4 QS 800MHz + GeForce4 Ti4200, OS 9
PowerMac G5 DP 1.8Ghz + ATi x800 XT, Leopard

Reply 4 of 4, by Adventure4Life

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Yeah... anything pre-6.1 in virtualBox has 3D acceleration... I read a few times after google searches that the last 5.2.44 is the best one to use. I have not done any tests on that... but it is the one I installed to run XP+. For security, I usually do not even install network functionality into the VM. I am not sure I ever need acess to the internet through the VMs for the tasks I use it for.

Visit my retro game review channel!! ~~ HERE ~~