Current status of virtualization

[fonz]

Howdy,

Just wondering: what's the current status of running other OSes as guest VMs on a FreeBSD host? As far as I know there are a few good DOS emulators out there (in fact, I'm using DOSbox at the moment) but there are no native versions of either VMWare or VirtualBox.

Basically, what I want is:

1. play the occasional Windows game (e.g. Grand Prix 4, Alpha Centauri etc.)
2. run a VM of Ubuntu Linux (required for the lab part of an OS course at my university)
3. play old DOS-era games (DOSbox is my friend here)
4. play games that used to run on old consoles like SNES, ZX Spectrum, C64, MSX, Arcade machines etc. (emulators for this seem to be available)

To what extent are these possible on a FreeBSD machine nowadays?

Thanks in advance,

Fonz

 

[vermaden]

[*]play the occasional Windows game (e.g. Grand Prix 4, Alpha Centauri etc.)

Depends on your GFX cards drivers and WINE, should work with Intel GMA or failVidia.

[*]run a VM of Ubuntu Linux (required for the lab part of an OS course at my university)

QEMU is currently only choice here :/

[*]play old DOS-era games (DOSbox is my friend here)

This one works as expected, no problems here.

[*]play games that used to run on old consoles like SNES, ZX Spectrum, C64, MSX, Arcade machines etc. (emulators for this seem to be available)

UAE for AMIGA games worked for me, havent tried other emulators.

 

[fonz]

Thanks for the quick reply!

Depends on your GFX cards drivers and WINE, should work with Intel GMA or failVidia.

I've got an NVidia Geforce Go 7600 card. Does that mean I can play Windows games using Wine?

QEMU is currently only choice here :/

This particular VM was made by VMWare, but if QEmu can run it that would be fine. I don't need much of the hardware, as long as I can compile and run simple console apps using Linux syscalls it'll be okay.

Thanks,

Fonz

 

[ale]

run a VM of Ubuntu Linux (required for the lab part of an OS course at my university)

As vermaden said, qemu can do that. I have installed an Ubuntu server on qemu times ago, just to have a look before having to install it on a real box.

This particular VM was made by VMWare, but if QEmu can run it that would be fine.

Qemu can convert it!
The port will install also qemu-img which has a convert option.

$ qemu-img
...
convert [-c] [-e] [-6] [-f fmt] [-O output_fmt] filename [filename2 [...]] output_filename
...
Supported format: parallels qcow2 vvfat vpc bochs dmg cloop vmdk qcow cow host_device raw

play games that used to run on old consoles like SNES, ZX Spectrum, C64, MSX, Arcade machines etc. (emulators for this seem to be available)

On my home desktop I have emulators/vice for cmb64/128/vic20/pet/plus4 and emulators/xmame for arcade games.
They both work great.

 

[fonz]

Thanks a lot to both of you, I'll go check them out!

Fonz

 

[vermaden]

I've got an NVidia Geforce Go 7600 card. Does that mean I can play Windows games using Wine?

Sometimes its just about adding the nvidia driver by ports/packages, but sometimes you need to check several versions of the driver to get the working one.

 

[ale]

play the occasional Windows game (e.g. Grand Prix 4, Alpha Centauri etc.)

Once I tried installing a game on w2k on qemu, but I failed because, if I remember well, I was unable to install directx, that I think are needed by almost all windows game.
Maybe it was my fault, or maybe starting it -std-vga option could work...

 

[fonz]

Thanks, I'll consider that. I have a Windows (Vista, yuck!) partition so I can install the games natively if necessary (in fact, I think that's probably the better option). As long as they run from an emulator/VM afterwards, that's what's most important for me.