Retrogaming On Windows XP – Properly Captured From Parallels (MacOS)

#Parallels #WindowsXP #Gaming

Using OBS with a capture view port set at 1920×1980 exactly in the middle of the 49″ Ultrawide enabled OBS to Capture the full screen Parallels WindowsXP output properly this time. Albeit with colour aberrations and without the ability to directly capture sound (MacOS is a real pain not being able to set specific resolution and direct audio capture).

Computers have always been used to play games on besides work / study related things. And despite the fact that Windows is very compatible with games dating years back there sometimes is a necessity to run games on the real hardware or software environment. Ideally a real system. But that’s not available to all people so Emulation or Virtualization might be the next best thing.

DOSBox-X – MS-DOS, Windows3.xx, 95/98/Me (early DirectX and 3Dfx)
PCEm – MS-DOS, Windows95/98/Me (early directX and 3Dfx)
86Box – MS-DOS, Windows95/98/Me (early directX and 3Dfx)
QEmu – MS-DOS, Windows95/98 (with softGPU) directX games)
VMWare – MS-DOS, Windows95/98 (with softGPU DirectX games)
VirtualBox – Windows95/98 (with softGPU DirectX games)
Parallels – WindowsXP DirectX gaming (Mac Only)

In the early 2000s VMWare and Virtual box supported 3D3, DirectX inside of the VMs but that was when the PCs running these virtualization utilities pretty much had hardware that itself was capable of running Windows XP. Ever since computers have moved beyond that and not easily natively run Windows XP – support for XP as a client witin VMs has been watered down and especially 3D accelerated graphics-support has since been dropped by those two.

PCEm, 86Box allow XP to be installed but their graphics capabilities don’t go beyond Voodoo3 3Dfx which has a rather limited DirectX support. It seems that from all modern PCs I have in the house none of them actually provides a decent gaming experience for specific more high end Windows XP games except for my Intel MacMini 2018 (as well as the 2014 model). That even runs Halo and other games on Windows XP well in a virtual environment.

I am quite flabbergasted by the fact that running games needing a proper 3D Accelerated GPU within Windows XP on a current / modern system for me works best on my 2018 MacMini (intel i5 6 core machine with iGPU). Whaaat?

Hardware:
Mac mini (2018) Intel
3.0GHz 6-core Intel Core i5,
Turbo Boost up to 4.1GHz,
9MB shared L3 cache
32 Gb DDR4 SO-DIMM 2666Mhz
256Gb PCI-SSD,
Intel UHD Graphics 630

Software:
MacOS Mojave+
Parallels 17.x (Virtualization software)
WindowsXP 32bit SP3
OBS
Davinci Resolve

Chapters
00:00:00 – Tinkering & Figuring out how to capture Parallels at the best resolution from the 49″ ultrawide
00:01:15 – Booting into Windows XP setting the viewport
00:02:00 – Forgot to enable sound
00:02:31 – Figured it out – proper capture running some of the benchmarks and playing Halo!

Enjoy & thanks for watching,
Mark V. aka LactobacillusPrime

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