rechecking re connectix virtual pc relative performance?

[chelseayr]

if you were on a 200mhz pci powermac and didn't have too much background things (extra extensions especially) loaded, would the emulation performance perhaps be similar to a 120mhz pentium or close?

the guest os would had been windows 95, running simple desktop apps or 'slower' games (I mean - for a quick example from my head now lets say yes to railroad tycoon 2 but no to quake 2) just for notes

 

[obsolete]

It's been a while, but I would guess closer to 75MHz equivalent than 120MHz. Hopefully someone can step in with some benchmarks.

 

[Cory5412]

I, too, would guess much slower than 120 for VPC on a 200MHz 604.

If you have everything on hand though I would say why not give it a try? Worst that can happen is the games you're looking at run poorly enough that they're unplayable-adjacent due to interface lag, but it probably really depends on the specific game, too.

VPC 4 if I remember right officially recommends a G3 at like 333 or higher for Windows 95 and newer which actually got me and my parents to return the copy they bought me when I had the 7300/200 the first time around. We swapped it for a copy of AppleWorks 5 at which point it occurred to me I still had to write my papers on the family computer because I didn't have a Mac printer and didn't want to deal with file conversions. (haha whoops.)

But I do expect a light 95 install would itself run fine on VPC a 604@200, even if 95-era games won't.

(Reminded yet again I eventually want to pop the dos/166 and a sata card in my 8500/601@100.)

 

[Phipli]

Reminded yet again I eventually want to pop the dos/166 and a sata card in my 8500/601@100.

Reminder : You want to put your 601@100MHz, SATA card and a Voodoo 1 in your 8500.

 

[Snial]

if you were on a 200mhz pci powermac and didn't have too much background things (extra extensions especially) loaded, would the emulation performance perhaps be similar to a 120mhz pentium or close?

the guest os would had been windows 95, running simple desktop apps or 'slower' games (I mean - for a quick example from my head now lets say yes to railroad tycoon 2 but no to quake 2) just for notes

I have SoftWindows 3.0 on my PB 1400c/166 running Windows 3.1 (or 3.11 I forget which) in 386 mode. It feels like a 33MHz 386DX to 33MHz 486DX, but I haven't bench tested it as such. I mostly ran Borland Turbo C++, ClarisWorks 1.0 (for Windows) and the IAR H8 compiler. It was... usable to OK. It was faster than the 100MHz 486DX4 I originally had been given at DAC, but it was chronically slow because it only had 4MB of RAM. It's certainly slower than the 66MHz 486DX2 I got them to swap it with.

So, as a rough estimate, an interpretive emulator would run about 100x slower than the host. That's because the host would need to emulate the MMU and a whole host of environmental factors.

A JIT (or DRE) emulator is faster, maybe merely 10x to 20x slower than a host. This is because there's a trade-off between the compilation effort and emulator performance; and the JIT cache, but also because again, mismatches between the host and target architecture add up, particularly with flags. e.g. a PCI PowerMac is big-endian, emulating a little-endian computer.

The Gary Davidian 68K emulator achieved much better than a 100x slowdown, roughly 12x slower, because it didn't really have to emulate the system architecture (only the CPU); Apple allowed some apps to fail ("Fix your 68K app guys!") and critical system components were native (QuickDraw, Memory Manager and a few other things).

So, a 200MHz 604e would be like a 50MHz to 100MHz Pentium (maybe) with a DRE emulator and a 20MHz Pentium (40MHz 486DX) with an interpretive emulator. So, @obsolete 's estimate of a 75MHz Pentium sounds more credible.

 

[chelseayr]

I had thought software emulating would indeed be taking a hit but perhaps it look like could be more than what I had initially guessed at. but hmm yeah software is just software I won't mind eventually giving it a try and see what happens, as if it doesn't work out then theres always the trash can in lower-right corner for this! heh

 

[AlpineRaven]

I have always said to myself in the past - half of what your actual CPU speed is what it would be for VPC's performance.
Cheers
AP

 

[Byrd]

I reckon Virtual PC gives half the rated CPU speed for desktop performance - running Office style applications, but pretty much for games don't bother. There is a version of VirtualPC that supports 3DFX cards "natively", which I once got all excited about and tried however very jerky not just low FPS.

 

[chelseayr]

ah bryd that has to be vpc 2.x, and even on the MG you can find a simple pdf that quickly describes the voodoo1/2 "passthru"

Connectix Virtual PC 2 - Macintosh Garden

Virtual PC is PC emulation software that provides users with the ability to run various Windows operating systems and software at reduced speed, right on their Macintosh, including DOS, Windows 3.1, 95, ME, and 2000. Slower PowerPC systems will want to stick with DOS or Windows 3.1.

macintoshgarden.org

I find the idea interesting seeing that even for modern VM's they occassionally still talk about passing actual hardwares through it too

nevertheless I don't see wanting to block up precious pci slots with an expensive voodoo2 card myself and beside I can't really think of any good windows-based games I would want to find (versus the many graphics-simplier mac games I already like or soon eventually want to try!)

heh?

 

[nathall]

I’ve got some version of Virtual PC installed on my LC III and it works OK for text mode only MSDOS stuff, but screen updates can be slow. Won’t handle any sort of graphical stuff. I guess I was surprised it worked at all on a 68030.

 

[aladds]

Blue Label Power Emulator also does voodoo passthrough. I seem to remember it being okay https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/blue-label-power-emulator-18