Nicolas Richeton

I’m currently trying the new Beta of VMWare Fusion. Windows installation and setup were fast and easy. And I have to say that the Unity mode is great and lets Windows applications behave like OSX ones. I successfully watched videos using Windows MediaPlayer in OSX.

This reminds me that, a long time ago, a Pentium extension card was developped for the “Hades 60″, an ATARI-compatible computer running Mint on a 68060 CPU. This card was able to run Windows 95 along with the main OS (several people saw it working). Screenshots looked the same as the VM Ware in Unity mode : applications of both operating systems worked side to side. But there was no virtualization involved. It was basically 2 computers in the same box, sharing hardware and displaying apps on the same desktop. (I tried to find screenshots on the internet but I could find one. It was back in 1998)

But if VMWare works great for business apps, I can’t say the same for games. I only tried a 2D game with low CPU requirements (GGXX) and it has too many slowdowns to be playable, even with hardware acceleration. Anyway if you want to play games, the best thing to do is to use bootcamp and install WinXP without virtualization.