DCS on MacOS with Windows VMs

[AV8R]

Currently Flaming Cliffs, DCS-BS and DCS-A10c cannot run under a virtual machine on a Mac.

LockOn does however. A workaround is to run these sims under a dual boot Mac (bootcamp),

but then we lose the multitasking advantages of running on a Mac if we switch the OS to pure Windows.

 

The request is that the development team consider allowing DCS to run within a virtual machine.

 

Below is LockOn running on a MacBookPro running Snow Leopard 10.6.6 with VMware's Fusion

3.1.2 and Windows Vista Home Premium. It runs great on a MBP 17" with 4GB memory

and an Intel dual2core 2.4 ghz processor. Even DCS-A10c b4 runs under bootcamp with medium

settings.

 

 

:pilotfly:

Edited February 17, 2011 by AV8R

[EtherealN]

Not possible due to technical reasons, AFAIK.

 

What exactly are the "advantages" of running on Mac btw? You'll be killing performance through having the virtual machine as a middleman.

[jeffyd123]

Macs are not for gaming.... only for browsing the web at your local latte' shop.

 

They had their time and chance to make their computers viable and Steve Jobs blew it. The only reason Apple is still in business is Apple's Genius engineers creating the Iphone/Ipod.

 

Now that Apple has crawled back from the 1% market share they had Steve Jobs has to do what he has always done and prove he is Apple's biggest enemy by saying "Let's do away with Flash".

 

What a dufus....

 

BTW I used to own a Mac and was a fanboy of theirs.

 

Now that I said my rant about them... Macs are nice computers.... Its just Steve Jobs that I dont like. He is greedy and if he had his way, we would pay for every single 60Kilobyte app that we use and all of our computers would cost $4,000.

I guarantee that if he didnt put his Leechy claws into Woz back in the day old Steve would be working at some ad agency selling soap or cars.

[Toxe]

The request is that the development team consider allowing DCS to run within a virtual machine.

Why? Virtual Machines are not for gaming in the first place, despite all the stuff the marketing guys say. If you can run older games in a virtual machine, great, but dont expect newer games to run as good as they would on the real machine.

 

If ED really wanted to help people running their sims on the Mac they should consider a native Mac port. True, that would be great but I suppose that the Mac sim market is rather slim at the moment. So that would be a lot of wasted time on ED's part.

 

Does any one know what percentage of X-Plane users run it on a Mac rather than Windows?

 

...

That's a big bunch of crap. And this isn't the place for discussing which system sucks more, anyways.

[jeffyd123]

actually its not crap... if jobs licensed the mac OS back in 1984 we all would be on macs now.... but no, he was greedy and PCs took over. I find it funny how so many worship him as a genius.

[EtherealN]

Jeffyd:

1 - That's some serious hate you've got there. Do something about that.

2 - If you think someone can create that many companies (it's not only apple, you know - there's also Pixar etc) and be some sort of incompetent... err, no. Just ain't like that. (Put it like this: when he came back to the company they were at rock bottom and almost dead - they are now bigger than Microsoft.)

3 - Finding it funny how people worship him is about as funny as how funny I find it when people take any mention of "mac" as a timely reason to just spew vitriol over him.

 

Jobs is richer than you and not without reason. Get over it and let the thread remain on topic or I'll hand out the warnings for Off-Topic posting.

Edited February 18, 2011 by EtherealN

[mig29]

@AV8R: How much FPS drop did you see when you played it on the virtual machine (compared to the FPS when you played it on "pure Windows")?

[Revelation]

You'll always see better performance running it natively on Windows versus VMWare. Think about it, your computer is running 2 operating systems and a game before you even talk about all of the simulated I/O interfaces.

 

Get over it and let the thread remain on topic or I'll hand out the warnings for Off-Topic posting.

 

Too bad, I wish I could respond to a certain poster/post without getting put in timeout...

[EtherealN]

Too bad, I wish I could respond to a certain poster/post without getting put in timeout...

 

PM him. ;)

Or call him out in a new thread in the hardware section or something. Off-topic can be made on-topic through creating a new thread. :)

[Darkness_E69]

I'm running DCS on a iMac and it rocks, by the way I dont understand people who talk about a dieing Apple. It is growing constantly and getting bigger and bigger. And I can run DCS A10 with Windows and then work with MacOs, I get the best of two worlds in a single machine.

 

And one more thing... This was written with and iPad where I carry all the DCS A10 docs ;)

[EtherealN]

Bah, iPad... Overpriced crap. :P (Well, to be fair, the only reason I don't own one is that I'd have to Jailbreak it on pure principle, and then I might as well get a Galaxy Tab 2 or something like that. :P )

 

No, but I agree. The main issue I have with Macs is the rather limited and slow hardware adoption, and they do come at a premium compared to home-built PC's - compare the pricetags on the 21-inch iMacs and a comparable PC for example. (But the laptops are very nice - the genius of the magnetic power connectors and so on...)

 

But running games under a VM is probably not a very good idea. It's easy enough to just dualboot through Bootcamp that it is (IMO) just not worth the performance overhead - and that market would be very small for ED, so I just don't see how it would be worth the expense to make DCS work through a VM.

[Moa]

While I have a PC as my main LockOn client and another PC for my LockOn ("stallturn") server I find I can uses Parallels on my 17" MacBook Pro to do mission editing just fine. I also did track playback and run LockOn a little when I was doing development of the lottu program. The main reason I don't do LockOn on the MacBook Pro is thermal output when running that game for a few hours, plus my other computer is so much more powerful than any laptop (my Radeon HD 5970 my itself is twice as high as my MacBook Pro, longer from front-to-back, and about 1/3 the width).

 

Incidentally, there are many games that gave been ported to the Mac to run natively (eg. I have Portal, Civilization V, Hearts of Iron III) and they run wonderfully. More and more are coming as developers wake up to the fact that if they write the game properly that can target many platforms, including Mac and iPhone/iPad. X-Plane is primarily developed on the Mac and runs better there than Windows. So basically, it is all about what the developers put time into making work right.

 

Games that are developed cross-platform tend to be better quality. Developing cross-platform also has other advantages in that those with products developed solely for the Windows made sense a decade ago but doesnt now. If you have the *skill set* to develop cross-platform then you develop for Windows *and* Mac *and* consoles *and* smartphones. That's a lot more money if you choose the right cross-platform technologies. Because Austin Meyer of X-Plane had that skill it personally meant he made $3.5 million dollars in one month when the iPhone came out and completely blew away all the PC sales he had made in the last decade.

 

Please read the following with an open mind:

http://techhaze.com/2010/03/interview-with-x-plane-creator-austin-meyer/

 

Similarly, IL-2 was able to be moved to consoles (as well as Windows) in the form of Wings of Prey, and make a large number of sales since it was written in portable Java and OpenGL, with only a few non-portable C++ chunks.

 

'Exclusive' is generally a bad word in business, and developing 'exclusive for Windows' is bad for everyone except Microsoft. No one knows what the next growth platform will be, so it is best to try and use technologies that allow you to have flexibility in your choices (eg. OpenGL skills are worth more than DirectX since you can also program phones as well as PCs, Macs, and industrial Unix etc).

 

Windows is great not because it is better than Mac, Linux or Unix at anything in particular (generally it is worse) but because there is so much good software (eg. games) that works on it. This is no accident, Microsoft have encouraged developers in all sorts of ways to get them to work on Windows and lock them in there. Unfortunately those still stuck on Windows are now paying the price as growth in Windows is far lower than in other forms of computing devices.

Edited February 18, 2011 by Moa

[wasserfall]

Why are people always bashing on Mac's?

 

The guy just asked a question!

 

Could that be that i own a Mac?.... yes it's a Imac coreI7 27Inch!

 

But for gaming i use a Pc I7 950 !!

 

Both have there strong and weak points

 

But it would be nice to run FC/DCS on an Imac without the need of buying a second Win7 license!

 

At the company were i work we use Mac and Pc side by side, PLEASE don't ask me WHICH one i prefer!

 

Regards!

[Toxe]

Well said, Moa.

[jeffyd123]

well to keep my rant down i will say that macs can do this in VM mode but it is software rendering so its going to be slow. Its not designed to run something as demanding as a game.

 

I dont hate Mac, I greatly admire their technical geniuses, its Jobs that I dont like.

 

I also applaud Moa's post... very well said. Windows isnt perfect but its a real can-opener where Macs have always been narrower in their scope.

Edited February 18, 2011 by jeffyd123

[NoJoe]

Windows isnt perfect but its a real can-opener where Macs have always been narrower in their scope.

 

Hehe, I actually kind of got the opposite impression from Moa's post. :P :D

 

I'm going to go with the Bootcamp crowd on this one. The advantage of being able to do Mac stuff while running DCS/LockOn through a VM is good, but the performance trade off is a deal-killer for me. Besides, how long does it take to restart back to Mac OS after you're done simming? All of 10 or 15 seconds? :D

 

--NoJoe

[winz]

well to keep my rant down i will say that macs can do this in VM mode but it is software rendering so its going to be slow. Its not designed to run something as demanding as a game.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but virtualization doesn't imply software rendering. Not to mention that HW virtualization capabilities have spread to mainstream CPUs (they were present on the server ones for some time), so virtualized OS can run natively on the CPU, and not via sw emulation.

[Gonzo01]

I hate to put it this way, but you are comparing Apples and Oranges. A computer is only as powerful as the software available for it. I own four Macs and two PC's. I have had both, Apple and PCs all my life to accommodate my different software needs. If you leave gaming out of the picture, pound for pound the Apple blows the doors off the best PC you can build.

 

Try to understand that the Apple is a true 64 bit architecture written from scratch under Unix, and windows, for good reason is part 64 bit, part 32 bit and even part 16 bit in order maintain backwards compatibility with legacy software.

 

I can say without a doubt that the software I run on the Apple is much more complex than the software that I run on a PC. In the last year I have never had to reboot my Apples once due to a operating system crash. How many people can say that about a PC running windows. I have never even rebooted my Apple in the last year, it's on 24 hours a day.

 

Now there are pros and cons to both systems. Apple is a closed architecture with strict coding guidelines that adds to it's stability, but also adds to a lack of flexibility, while the windows operating system is an open architecture which leads to adhoc coding standards with more flexibility but a lack of system stability.

 

From a pure construction and quality point view, you get what you pay for. Apples generally cost twice as much as a PC, but they last for a very long time, there made of all metal parts, very little plastic if any and ergonomically they are functionality following form.

 

You need to use the right tool for the right job. If I want to play DCS A-10C I use a PC. Everything else I do on my Apples.

 

Trying to run windows on an Apple using Bootcamp is actually running windows through an emulator. You are not really running the Apple operating system. This is just like trying to run Windows under DOS, not a very campatable or stable idea.

Edited February 18, 2011 by Gonzo01

[EtherealN]

In the last year I have never had to reboot my Apples once due to a operating system crash. How many people can say that about a PC running windows.

 

*Raises hand*

Try the last two years.

 

It has crashed, but it has been caused by things like faulty RAM.

The big difference in stability between the two OSes, imo, is quite simply that the Windows ecosystem has more users that can be considered laymen - thus the risk of doing things to the OS that it doesn't like is increased.

 

I have however seen the office iMac crash. ;)

 

I have never even rebooted my Apple in the last year, it's on 24 hours a day.

 

My PC only gets rebooted when one of two things happen:

1 - Power failure. (I live out in nowhere so storms will relatively often take down my power.)

2 - I want to go into BIOS for some reason (usually when switching between OC and non-OC settings).

3 - I want to work with the hardware (mandates a cut power supply).

 

But let's not derail this too far. The question at hand is specifically DCS/FC2 under VM on MacOS instead of bootcamping it.

Edited February 18, 2011 by EtherealN

[Gonzo01]

*Raises hand*

Try the last two years.

 

It has crashed, but it has been caused by things like faulty RAM.

The big difference in stability between the two OSes, imo, is quite simply that the Windows ecosystem has more users that can be considered laymen - thus the risk of doing things to the OS that it doesn't like is increased.

 

I have however seen the office iMac crash. ;)

 

 

 

My PC only gets rebooted when one of two things happen:

1 - Power failure. (I live out in nowhere so storms will relatively often take down my power.)

2 - I want to go into BIOS for some reason (usually when switching between OC and non-OC settings).

3 - I want to work with the hardware (mandates a cut power supply).

 

But let's not derail this too far. The question at hand is specifically DCS/FC2 under VM on MacOS instead of bootcamping it.

 

And who wrote Office for the Mac, Microsoft.:music_whistling:

 

If the system is not designed to do it, then your just asking for compatiblity problems.

 

Stay on the PC for games it was designed better to accommodate that kind of environment.

Edited February 18, 2011 by Gonzo01

[Darkness_E69]

It's a matter of time. Apple's growing and MacOs has, we need to remember, a Unix system in its core, stable and very powerful. I think ED and all the other developers can start to think of this platform as the future to develop new games. Macs sell well and many people are migrating from Windows to Mac. Some examples I know from friends and colleagues, but you only need to read comparative sales among computer manufacters. Steam already is working on it, and with very good sales.

[EtherealN]

And who wrote Office for the Mac, Microsoft.:music_whistling:

 

Err, "Office iMac" as in "it is in my office". Not "it runs office". Actually, it has OpenOffice. Everything else on it is made by Apple. (EDIT: Well, Apple and the FreeBSD developers :P )

 

My point basically is this: any machine on any OS can be stable or unstable - it just depends on what you do with/to it. Well, 95/98/ME are definitely exceptions, and I'm not exactly a fan of XP either. But it's not like OS8 and OS9 that we used back in school were dreams of stability - but again this was caused by 3 billion students doing various funky stuff to the machine, so of course it'll become unstable. :P

 

But anyways, how about we agree to not continue this nice little PC vs Mac war? Or we could move it down in Hardware/Software? :)

Edited February 18, 2011 by EtherealN

[Moa]

Both Parallels and VMware have *hardware* graphics acceleration that is pretty good, but generally not quite as fast as 'native' access. The more powerful the hardware (eg. newer machine) then you don't notice that much.

 

With regard to expense of Apples. They are generally as expensive as PCs with comparable hardware specs. The difference is that there are no low-end Apples like there are low-end PCs (same with iPhones, they simply don't make low-end phones since they want to command the margins of a luxury/status good). This is because Apple simply doesn't care about the low-end masses, they're going for the higher profitability of the high-end segments. Financially they are benefiting as a result.

 

All that said, while Apple hardware and software are great their business ethos completely sux. They regularly screw their early adopters and are quite awful to developers (eg. draconian, arbitrary and quite selfish AppStore rules - which always favor Apple over any potential competitors). For this reason Android will eventually beat Apple (just as Microsoft eventually beat Apple with a more open ecosystem two decade ago).

[Moa]

It's a matter of time. Apple's growing and MacOs has, we need to remember, a Unix system in its core, stable and very powerful. I think ED and all the other developers can start to think of this platform as the future to develop new games. Macs sell well and many people are migrating from Windows to Mac. Some examples I know from friends and colleagues, but you only need to read comparative sales among computer manufacters. Steam already is working on it, and with very good sales.

 

 

No! it's a mistake to back a single horse. The idea is to back them all by favoring cross-platform and open technologies where there is a choice between possible implementations. Then you are better positioned for the future no matter how it turns out (and earlier I gave examples of how other companies were smart by doing this). Having to develop a native version for each possible platform is prohibitively expensive - so you have to design for as much platform independence as you can from the start (some parts usually end up being native, but you minimize these through conscious effort and good design). Then the marginal cost of building for additional platforms is lower than the extra revenue you get for each platform (essentially, there is a core development cost that is amortized among all platforms you manage to sell to).

[Toxe]

I'd say that without a doubt we will see a lot more gaming happening on Macs in the future. Apples market share is continously increasing -- and with good reason. And now there is Steam on the Mac. When I installed Steam I was surprised how many games I already own that word on the Mac.

 

As you might have guessed I am one of those happy Mac guys and I'd love to see more games for it. But at the moment a native Windows PC is hands down the better system for playing modern games and there is now way that a VM can replace it.

 

But for everything else it gets blown out of the water by Macs, IMHO.