DarK wrote:

What VM's really need is for graphics manufactures to setup and provide an interface that a VM can tap into directly, similar in principals to VT extensions on newer CPU's

Still not going to happen soon

Actually that's what VT-d is for. It's not done by the GPU, but it does allow switching direct access to physical devices between VMs (and/or the host OS, in the case of hosted VMMs) in a secure manner.

DarK,

Bochs is an emulator. It doesn't do virtualization. The virtualization software I use, VirtualBox, is open source and free. It has recently gained 3d acceleration by providing OpenGL passthrough from the guest operating system to the host operating system. With a Windows guest, it can provide Direct3d acceleration by using Wine's DirectX implementation to convert Direct3d calls into OpenGL calls which can then be passed through to the host's OpenGL implementation. From the user's perspective, this is accomplished by installing 4 libraries in the Windows guest (libwine.dll, wined3d.dll, d3d8.dll, and d3d9.dll).

Parallels Desktop for Mac provides it's 3d acceleration in exactly the same way: OpenGL passthrough and Direct3d translation derived from Wine. This was first made obvious when games running under Parallels exhibited the same graphical glitches they did when running under Wine. Parallels has since acknowledged their use of Wine code and released the source as required by the LGPL.

VMWare claims that Fusion's Direct3d support is implemented using dynamic recompilation of Direct3d to OpenGL. It's hard to believe they would have started from scratch, though, and their implementation could easily be based off one of the MIT/X11 licensed forks of Wine.

For the foreseeable future, direct3d compatibility layers will be preferable to graphics card virtualization due to higher security, better compatibility, lower reliance on graphics card manufacturers, and a complete lack of need for modifying the host operating system, even though it probably results in some preformance penalty.

Tesseract wrote:

DarK wrote:

What VM's really need is for graphics manufactures to setup and provide an interface that a VM can tap into directly, similar in principals to VT extensions on newer CPU's

Still not going to happen soon

Actually that's what VT-d is for. It's not done by the GPU, but it does allow switching direct access to physical devices between VMs (and/or the host OS, in the case of hosted VMMs) in a secure manner.

Did'nt know about this, but I can't see a GPU been able to be handed off without the host OS having to give up the ability to render.

isomorphic wrote:

DarK,

Bochs is an emulator. It doesn't do virtualization.

DarK wrote:

http://bochs.sourceforge.net is one of the original emulators;

erm ??

isomorphic wrote:

The virtualization software I use, VirtualBox, is open source and free. It has recently gained 3d acceleration by providing OpenGL passthrough from the guest operating system to the host operating system. With a Windows guest, it can provide Direct3d acceleration by using Wine's DirectX implementation to convert Direct3d calls into OpenGL calls which can then be passed through to the host's OpenGL implementation. From the user's perspective, this is accomplished by installing 4 libraries in the Windows guest (libwine.dll, wined3d.dll, d3d8.dll, and d3d9.dll).

Ok, Fair enough, however you will not get native speeds because you will always loose on the overhead required to convert calls.

isomorphic wrote:

VMWare claims that Fusion's Direct3d support is implemented using dynamic recompilation of Direct3d to OpenGL. It's hard to believe they would have started from scratch, though, and their implementation could easily be based off one of the MIT/X11 licensed forks of Wine.

VMWare do use their own stuff, http://www.usenix.org/events/wiov08/tech/full_papers/dowty/dowty_html/

I will argue against the compatibility layers, as this is a form of emulation/translation which will always give you a slow down.

Virtualisation on the hardware is quicker and faster.

DarK wrote:

Did'nt know about this, but I can't see a GPU been able to be handed off without the host OS having to give up the ability to render.

Doesn't really matter if you're running a fullscreen game in the guest. And the host can take control back when it wants to.

Inspired by what I was reading in this thread, I booted into linux to try Uru there under WINE.

It installed without any problems!

I launched it without problems and managed to customise my character and get into the cleft:



After a quick WINE tweak, I got it running full-screen but I opted for 800x600 res for just now.



Unfortunately, the circular cursor displays only as a white square.

I would point out that a lot of the sounds didn't play so I'll have a fair bit of tinkering to get it running properly but I got a bit of a surprise when I
entered the Bahro cave under the tree:



At this point, when I clicked on the Relto book, nothing happened.

I will now be playing around with this and tryong to get this up and running properly.

Getting my favourite stuff up and running under linux only motivates me further to swap my machine from Windows/Linux dual-boot to Linux/Windows dual-boot before dropping Windows from my system altogether...

_________________
Inferiority Complex
Everyone has a better name than me...

Curious... Has anybody gotten Uru: CC to run with VirtualBox on a Mac?

Malfhok wrote:

Curious... Has anybody gotten Uru: CC to run with VirtualBox on a Mac?

VIrtualBox only supports OpenGL acceleration at this time.

_________________
MOULa KI #23298
MOUL KI #35129
D'mala KI #74265
Gehn KI #10113

I just gave it a try on a Windows 7 virtual machine, and apart from being unplayably slow (2-3 FPS), stuff that's supposed to be rendered into textures appearing in the lower left corner (bug also seen on other WineD3D derivatives), and wavesets (water) being invisible, it seems to work alright.

Deledrius, from version 3 on Direct3D is supported.

Christian Walther wrote:

from version 3 on Direct3D is supported.

But the kit inside is wine derived anyway, if it runs on VBox, why not just use wine?

Less overhead for a start ...

Christian Walther wrote:

Deledrius, from version 3 on Direct3D is supported.

Oh, so they did. Excellent.

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog

Dark - WINE is more difficult to set up on OSX than simply installing VirtualBox. Depends on what your usage pattern is, I suppose.

_________________
MOULa KI #23298
MOUL KI #35129
D'mala KI #74265
Gehn KI #10113

Inferiority Complex wrote:

entered the Bahro cave under the tree:



At this point, when I clicked on the Relto book, nothing happened.

I will now be playing around with this and tryong to get this up and running properly.

Haha, you can see where they've bolted a symbol to the wall in the second picture.

Hmmm.

I've only ever played MO:UL on a Mac. Without an emulator/virtualization.

When it shipped as part of GameTap, they build and distributed a Mac client. It ran great. I wonder what happened to that?

I'm assuming it was some client that used Cedega (The Windows version of the game wrapped in some Win32/DirectX library stuff for Mac OS X), but that'd be fine with me considering it worked just fine. But if that's true it also probably not distributable as Cyan doesn't own the Cedega code (ironic, since most of Cedega is actually Open-source code. But some is not).

I'm surprised no one here has mentioned any of this yet =)

Edit: Ah, someone mentioned it in passing. "This app will run as a Cider port, just like MOUL did." And yeah, I meant "Cider", not "Cedega", although they're extremely closely related.

Edit2: Man, and so did the VERY FIRST POST. "MOUL used a Cider wrapper from Transgaming, but that must have been on a commercial basis. That probably isn't sustainable on open source". Need to reeeeeeeead. =)

This is the better thread about this, including discussions on using the Gametap Cider wrapper to get the game to run:

http://mystonline.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19182

If been playing the game with the help of Wine Bottle on a Core i7 iMac. It runs surprisingly well. The most annoying thing is the fact the audio starts good then goes all buzzing, if you link the audio starts good again only to buzz once again.

As far as the game tap Cider wrapper, I couldn't get that to work at all, the updater just hangs. At least this is all promising for official Cyan Mac support even if it is running under virtualization.