I want to ditch my windows computer, however still want to play games. I figure that if I sell my windows systems I can buy a dual processor board and another processor for my linux system. I would like to run windows in a VM so I can play games and use the couple windows apps that I still use (VC++). I tried plex86 but couldn''t even figure out how to start the program, and found no docs on their website. I tried VMWare but it doesn''t support DirectX, it had great speed, and ran Windows 2000 fine, but without being able to play games I''m just going to uninstall it. When I get home I am going to try out win4lin but would like to know of any stumbling blocks that people have come across. What kind of speed can I expect? The website says it now supports DX, how full is that support? Is there any other VM software out there that is worth using?

"The paths of glory lead but to the grave." - Thomas Gray A Collection of zede''s montages (made without his knowledge or consent)

WineX??? Otherwise, Bochs is nice Slow of course, but that''s what you get for using a VM.

Do you know if Bochs supports DirectX?


The reason I don't list Wine (winex) is because I want something that I know will work with everything, right away. I'm also going to be doing development on this system and I don't need to be getting strange errors related to wine.

[edited by - griffenjam on February 9, 2004 6:18:28 PM]

quote: Original post by griffenjam
I want to ditch my windows computer, however still want to play games. I figure that if I sell my windows systems I can buy a dual processor board and another processor for my linux system.

I would like to run windows in a VM so I can play games and use the couple windows apps that I still use (VC++).

I tried plex86 but couldn''t even figure out how to start the program, and found no docs on their website.

I tried VMWare but it doesn''t support DirectX, it had great speed, and ran Windows 2000 fine, but without being able to play games I''m just going to uninstall it.

When I get home I am going to try out win4lin but would like to know of any stumbling blocks that people have come across. What kind of speed can I expect? The website says it now supports DX, how full is that support?

Is there any other VM software out there that is worth using?

"The paths of glory lead but to the grave." - Thomas Gray
A Collection of zede''s montages (made without his knowledge or consent)

There is the Bochs x86 emulator.

Actually, I think what you need is a dual boot system, not everything is perfect. I''m not sure that bochs supports directx and if it does it will probably be too slow to play somewhat recent games.

Hope that helps
Matt

quote: Original post by griffenjam
Do you know if Bochs supports DirectX?

I''ve only tried it with Linux so far, and possibly a Net(?)BSD distribution... oh, and some DOS distribution too.

It should support DirectX... I think I don''t think you''ll be able to get any hardware acceleration though, everything should pass through the VGA BIOS, which is emulated. AKA your performance will ''be on teh spoke''.

Nothing is going to be guaranteed to play all games right out of the box but windows itself, for now (and even that isn''t guaranteed, but that''s besides the point). Many games will run via WineX. Bochs should support windows minus the gameage (since, although it supports DirectX like any other piece of software, it wouldn''t support the actual hardware acceleration I believe - and most new games, at least, require hardware acceleration).

For VC++, you can replace that with makefiles and g++/gcc/ld/cc/what have you... I actually prefer the extra control you have with makefiles/g++. But that''s just me.