Guest PC is an emulator of the x86 PC for the Mac OS X platform. We had a quick look at the product and we compared it to VirtualPC 6.1 that we also happened to have in-house. We used a dual PowerMac G4 1.25GHz with 2 GB of RAM and an ATi Radeon 9200 Pro, Mac OS X 10.3.9 as the host OS and Windows XP Pro as the guest OS. GuestPC supports DOS, Win95/98/ME/NT/XP/2k but there is the ability to potentially boot other OSes too (however we didn’t test this). When creating a new virtual PC image you can select from 300 MB to 32 GB of space for your guest OS, and memory from 32 MB to 512 MB. Then, you click on the “start OS installation” button and it fires up the emulated PC, reads from your CDROM and installs the OS. It took 2 hours to install Windows XP PRO on this machine.
After it got installed, it loaded in about 1.5 minutes to a full desktop. There are some add on drivers that GuestPC can install to extend the experience, and so we got these installed too. GuestPC’s interface is really simple, there are a few icons on the bottom of the OS window showing activity on the peripherals and the CPU load. Using Command+ESC you can release the mouse cursor from the emulated window.
I used Guest PC for over a month and I must say that it’s rock solid. If GuestPC has one great feature, that it is: stability.
I am not happy with the performance though. The kind of performance GuestPC gives me on this dual G4 is pretty much the same performance VirtualPC 5 was giving me on a Cube 450 Mhz 2 years ago. Loading notepad or IE takes a few seconds, while in VirtualPC 6.1 they are almost instant on the same machine (especially notepad). I found GuestPC to be 2-3 times slower than VirtualPC 6.1 in normal everyday usage (IE, office, PaintShopPro etc). I hear that GuestPC really shines when emulates Windows98SE instead on a G5 system. Maybe this is the case, but the reality of the thing is, most Mac users own G4s instead and they are more interested in emulating XP rather than the unstable and old Win98.
Graphics performance is pretty bleak too, there are lots of ugly redraws going on, as the graphics card emulated is a Cirrus Logic 5440 with 4 MBs of VRAM. Funny thing is, I used to actually have one of these cards in “real” life (not under emulation) and they were not too bad in 2D speed at the time, in fact, its 2D speed was better than the 16 MB S3 Trio that VirtualPC emulates. The main problem with the graphics card emulated here is the fact that it only emulates 4 MBs, and so GuestPC does not allow for more than XGA resolutions. I own a good 21″ SONY CRT monitor that can go all the way up to 2048×1536 (and 1600×1200 at 85 Hz), but GuestPC can’t take advantage of it. When I use the “full screen” option, I have to use GuestPC’s OS in XGA, which is a shame as my monitor is capable of a lot more.
GuestPC can’t save the state of the PC like VirtualPC does, but it can use Hibernation. Recovering from sleep with VirtualPC takes 5-8 seconds (suspension to disk, essentially), while recovering from hibernation with GuestPC can take up to 20-25 seconds. And what’s the deal with the “shut down” and “turn off” alert window? What’s the freaking difference on an emulated PC?
And a feature request: support VirtualPC’s image files (or include a utility that converts them to the GuestPC format). This can be an incentive for an old VirtualPC user to upgrade to GuestPC.
In conclusion, I have one thing to say to the GuestPC guys: bring down the price. GuestPC costs $70, but it offers a lesser experience than the $130 Virtual PC 7. Because I don’t see why someone would pick GuestPC over VirtualPC (at least for Windows OS support) or the free Qemu, the incentive should be an even better price. A price at around $40 is more like it. Or, further optimizations must occur.
Overall: 6/10
Well from your review i dont see why you would get it even if it was free. Hehe.
Eugenia mentions Qemu as an option at the end.
I tried the latest Mac version few days ago 0.63 here is what I noticed:
The env is really slow compared to MS virtual PC. Both had similar CPU usage patterns but Qemu took hours to install Windows XP.
After waiting for the installation for several hours. The setup rebooted the system to prepair for 1st boot. However it never loaded on Qemu (I ran out of patience and went to bed).
I will try the latest version when available.
P.S I used a 1 GHz ibook G4 with 512MB ram.
There is a jit engine for Qemu that you will need to install seperately, and also, Qemu is now at version 0.7.
GuestPC is much faster than qemu still, but you can’t beat the price of qemu.
That JIT engine is x86 only.
Guest PC is rather new, so cut the guys some slack, will you. There is still room for improvement. I personally still have an old VPC 5 which is good for my needs. Guest PC is good because it puts pressure on MS to keep VPC state-of-the-art. QEMU is too slow to be of practical use, and this was troubling me. VPC is an MS product, after all. MS might decide to kill VPC to keep potential switchers on windows. If Guest PC gets better, there will be some real competiton, and MS cannot wipe out the PC emulator market on Mac by axing VPC.
How would GuestPC run on a Mac mini 1.42Ghz with 512Mb? Since it’s only a single CPU…
I would like to run WinXP Home for a couple of software not found on Mac.
Sorry for the thread jack, but I just saw this: http://www.markusleonhardt.de/oelbilder.html and I thought the true bloods would appreciate that there is a new paradigm in computer cooling.
This is why you have to love the Linux crowd: no zany idea is not worth trying at least once [and I have genuine love and respect for the philosophy].
check it out.
Emulators are some of the most complicated stuff to get both right and fast. Grats to the GuestPC devs for making this work, and good luck with making it even better.
Connectix has had some years to get Virtual PC to where it is today after all.
Guest Pc isn’t exactly a new product. Years ago (1999?) lismore released an emulator called blue label. At the time it was slower than vpc but cost a lot less.
Not so zany… Mineral oil is used to cool the transformers on powerline poles outside. In the summer though, those things tend to not be able to cool enough.
I’d love to see them try it with a Prescott Pentium, that shit would boil.
Can someone please tell me, what the point of complete emulation is? If you need a platform to test, x86 is the cheapest. If you want to run software intended for another system, why not use something more like Virtual PC or VMWare? Those act more as simulators (Emulator imitates absolutely everything exactly as the original, where a simulator only does certain parts.)
Just because you can is great and all, but is not practical at all for someone who wants to run their old windows game or application. Bochs’ usefulnes puzzles me quite a bit. While it’s great that you can use any platform on any system, the overhead is so great, I can’t imagine it being useful for more than taking screen shots.
Who knows, with dual core athlon 64’s coming soon, maybe their performance will increase to the point where the Windows or Solaris migrator can make use of it.
You can’t tell me that if you’re in a serious software house and you want to support a platform that you don’t actually have that platform locally to test on.
Anyone know if there is a PowerPC virtualisation package similar to VMWare that I can run under OS X? I would really like to be able to use native PPC Linux distros from inside OS X.
I heard that MacOnLinux was porting their code to OS X but I haven’t seen a mention of it on their website since.
The only Windows package that I would like to be able to run on my 1.6Ghz G5 iMac is Sage Accounts (small business version, I forget the exact name as it’s really for my wife).
Would Guest PC be OK for this sort of package, assuming a guest OS of Win98SE and iMac memory of 512Mb?
What’s the memory footprint of the actual emulation suite compared to VPC?
Also, has anyone tried loading eComStation on it? How did that go?
How’s the network? Does it work well?
VirtualPC 7 networking only worked twice sporatically and never worked again (cannot see network card with Windows Server 2003, Linux, etc. on Powerbook G4). Is Guest PC working better than that? Thank you.
On Apple hardware, the best I know of right now is QEmu, which is not ideal. If, at some stage, a variant of the QEmu accelerator is added for PPC it’ll likely be much faster.
Some IBM PPC hardware includes hypervisor support in hardware. Apple disables this support in their G5s 🙁
Eventually, a port of Xen to the Mac is planned (tentatively including a port of xnu, the Darwin / MacOS X kernel). This is some way off, however.
The accelerator is not strictly a JIT module. JIT is effectively what QEmu usually does. The accelerator allows code to be copied directly from the executing program without going through translation. This can only work for x86 on x86 (I can’t remember if x86-64 is supported yet) at the moment.
link to maconlinux-port, called maconmac:
http://maconmac.bastix.net/
alpha version, right now you can install osx & os9, but no linux. and lots of other problems.