Retrogaming On WindowsXP Seems To Work Best On Mac? YEah, if You Want Accelerated 3D Graphics… 🤔

#Parallels #WindowsXP #Gaming

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?

My 2018MacMini is hooked up on my 49″ Samsung Ultrawide and the newer versions of MacOS on my MacMini dropped the ability to set the screen to a specific resolution with this monitor – this limits my abilities to capture footage at the right resolution from the Parallels video output. As a result the captures in this video of a rather horrid low-rez quality. If I use a more standard spec monitor this might not be as difficult.

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

Chapter:
00:00:00 – Introduction
00:00:41 – Starting up Parallels and booting up Windows XP
00:01:19 – 3DMark 2000 (DX7) with commentary
00:05:55 – Wondering if the capture worked
00:05:59 – Concluding that the capture worked (a bit borked but it worked)
00:06:06 – Starting up Parallels again booting up Windows XP
00:06:26 – DXDiag test (DX7, 8.1, 9)
00:08:06 – 3DMark 2001 with commentary (Matrix scene)
00:12:42 – 3DMark 2003 with commentary (WWII Planes)
00:22:09 – Sega Rally Championship 2 doing the 1st race (keyboard controls)
00:25:37 – Halo Combat Evolved – changing over the disc and playing game
00:34:51 – Doom TNT:Evilution (MS-DOS)(Dosbox) on Windows XP
00:35:45 – Switchball (3D Puzzle, action game with nice 3D graphics)
00:37:11 – 3D Pinball (Space Cadett) – Function keys have a function on MacOS interfering with the VM
00:39:20 – Quake OpenGL (3Dfx wrapper) on Windows XP
00:40:38 – Puzzle Bobble
00:41:35 – Pitfall
00:41:52 – Fez
00:41:28 – Expendable (Millenium Soldier) only the Android version is proper Twinstick!
00:45:03 – Running various hardware info tools showing what ‘shows’ through from the real hardware underneath the virtual machine
00:46:39 – Booting Windows98 VM – no 3D Acceleration but it does work
00:47:00 – DxDiag on Windows98, 3D software support
00:47:23 – MS-DOS Game Hexen on Windows98 with SB support
00:47:48 – Checking what type of MIDI Sound Windows98 does with Parallels (Microsoft GM)
00:48:02 – Parallels wants to upgrade/date
00:48:17 – Other VMs I have running on the MacMini 2018 with Parallels
00:48:29 – Closing remarks

More to come in the next video. Enjoy & thanks for watching,
Mark V. aka LactobacillusPrime

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