#VIRTUALIZATION FOR MAC FREE INSTALL#
#VIRTUALIZATION FOR MAC FREE DRIVERS#
#VIRTUALIZATION FOR MAC FREE DRIVER#

The virtual display driver that Q used for Windows 98 (a Cirrus Logic 5446 PCI) worked fine and gave me 24-bit color up to 1024x768 pixels, and 16-bit up to 1280x1024. Windows 98 runs as fast as any PC I ran it on in the late ‘90s but it did display its legendary instability, with Internet Explorer crashing when it tried to view some websites. Other CPUs Q can emulate are: x86-64, PPC PREP, SPARC-32, MIPS and ARM. Thus if you run it on a PowerPC Mac, it will emulate x86, and vice-versa.

#VIRTUALIZATION FOR MAC FREE INSTALL#

If you want to install Linux or another OS, you need to manually configure your Guest. Q provides several default Windows configurations for each version of Windows. A completely rewritten cocoa port of QEMU, built directly on OS X, making use of Apples Core-technologies like Core-image, Core-audio and OpenGL for in- and output, saving the overhead of cross platform APIs like SDL, FMOD or GTK. That was the initialization for Mike to develop Q. Pierre d’Herbemont from ported QEMU to OS X and initiated a cocoa Version. Q is based on the excellent open source CPU emulator QEMU from Fabrice Bellard. And running quite quickly and quite satisfactorily. With little optimism, I decided to give Q a go, assuming if Parallels couldn’t have a working version on the Core 2 Duo Macs, what hope would Q have?Ī couple of hours later, I had fully working versions of both Windows 98 and Windows XP running in Q. It’s quite entertaining the way that grey curtain of death sweeps down from above.! It runs and lets you create a virtual system, but when you try to fire up that system, Parallels cause a kernel panic. It doesn’t work on my new iMac Core 2 Duo. Like anyone though, I don’t really want to reboot every time I need to use Windows - despite it being only occasionally.Īnd like anyone, I was really keen to check out the acclaimed Parallels. If you’re interested, instructions can be found on CrossOSS. Needing multiple partitions for OS X, I set up a multi-partitioned hard disk and then installed Windows on one partition anyway - something Boot Camp wouldn’t let me do. It was then that I discovered Boot Camp isn’t necessary to run Windows. I encountered one problem though - you must install Boot Camp on a hard drive with only a single partition.

But if those things weren’t important II could have had a usable and bootable version of Windows on my iMac without any use of Boot Camp.

#VIRTUALIZATION FOR MAC FREE DRIVERS#

I ran and installed Windows on my iMac fine without even the Apple drivers - although of course networking and sound didn’t work and the display was not ideal. Unlike the impression it gives that it does something to your Mac to make it possible to install Windows. As it turns out, Boot Camp, appears to be nothing more than an application to non-destructively repartition your hard drive and create a disk of Mac drivers. Like most people who want Windows, I used Boot Camp. I’ll talk about it next week, but today I want to talk about running Windows on it. Last week I took delivery of a shiny new iMac.

Virtualization for mac free