Guest PC 1.2 has a 2x performance boost on G5s plus better support for dual-headed machines. Serial port support added. It became possible to communicate with serial devices such as modems, PDAs and cell phones. USB-to-Serial adapter is supported as well. Extended peripheral devices support. This feature allows to separately select modem and printer for every virtual computer.
GuestPC 1.2 Updater released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Anyone have any comparisons between GuestPC and Virtual PC?
I don’t have any real comparisons, but I recently bought GuestPC and I know that Win98 SE boots in ~30 seconds with GuestPC 1.0.1 on a G4 1.3GHz. It doesn’t run as fast as on a real PC, but it isn’t bad. I’ll expierment with 1.2 some and post some times later. I don’t have Virtual PC and now that GuestPC supports USB-to-Serial, I have absolutly zero intention of getting it.
BTW, WinXP ran pretty slow in 1.0.1, but Win98 SE is very usable.
Can guest-pc or virtual pc run the applications root-less (no windows desktop)? I would love that! I would think it would be possible, but might require a special windows display driver.
I am evaluating 1.2 as we speak. So far, we are 1.3 hours of the XP installation and it goes slowly. I will have to report more next week when my review will go live.
I bought it to play some of the old DOS games that I own. The only problem I have with it is that the SB16 emulation seems to be broken (1.2 doesn’t fix it). 16 bit digital sounds will play fine but music and 8bit sounds will not (this is even in Creative’s SB16 diagnostic software).
Try DOSBox for older games, it’s free and works quite well. Here’s a frontend for OS X: http://web.jet.es/guilly/slouc/software_petitdosbox.html
If you have time could you install Win98 SE, too? I run WinXP and Win98 SE and Win98 is loads faster, plus Win98 SE meets the requirements of most of the software that one would run under an emulator. With the unofficial service pack for Win98 SE, it even looks nice. I would say that Win98 SE feels like it is being ran on an PIII 500MHz or so PC on my iBook G4 1.3GHz.
I don’t have a Win98 CD handy I am afraid. I will have to test it only with XP and if I find some time, I might try Arch Linux with it too.
Eugenia,
Could you also test using CD-ROM disk images created using Disk Utility? For the life of me I cannot get them to work with Guest PC 1.0.1 or 1.2. I’ve emailed support and they responded the next day, but their instructions don’t seem to work.
I can’t be the only person having problems with this. I try to create a disk image of the Win98 CD and use it to install because the instructions say the installation goes faster. I’ve created an “Image from folder…” which makes an image that is greyed out in the “open disk image…” dialog box in Guest PC and “Image from device…” which creates corrupt images (text files have gibberish in them) that have disc read errors in Guest PC. However if I install Win 98 from the same CD that I tried to create the images with it works great.
I’m tearing my hair out over this issue. Plus, there is a strange bug in Guest PC when you try to enter a space in the “Install New OS…” dialog box under “Name” or “Company”. You can get around that by copy/pasting that info from TextEdit.
@MRTaylor:
Have you tried making an image from folder, and telling Disk Utility the image you are making is a ‘CD/DVD Master’ instead of ‘Read Only’ or ‘Compressed’?
I haven’t made an image myself, but I’ll try that and get back to you.