Quake under Virtual PC

Quake. If you do not know about this game - then I am not going to try and tell you about it. Really. Go check out: https://www.idsoftware.com/games/quake/quake/. Suffice to say that it is one of the key games in the evolution of the 3D first person genre of computer games. Most notably it was the first 3D first person shooting game where every object was displayed using textured polygons (predecessors resorted to 2D bitmaps for many objects - or untextured polygons). Nicest of all is that Quake runs beautifully under Virtual PC:        

In fact - Quake is one of the standard tests that we run whenever we make low level changes to Virtual PC. One thing that I have encountered recently is that if your computer is too fast - Quake can have some timing issues (running to fast or having erratic speeds). This can be easily remedied by using a standard slow down utility inside of the virtual machine (you can search my blog for pointers to such tools).

Cheers,
Ben

Comments

• Anonymous
  August 26, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  August 26, 2005
  "runs beautifully" without telling what h/w the host had, and how much resources were used, is like... completely unusable?
  
  If I need a 3.6GHz CPU and 1+GB of RAM to run Quake 1 in VPC, I'd rather consider an experimental root canal (or perhaps an old Pentium 90MHz with 32MB of RAM). :-)
  
  In addition, to put it in perspective and to display how good you are (or not) in comparison with Free Software, I don't dubt you outrun BOCHS, but how do you perform in comparison with a usermode QEMU running on a Win32 host with plain GDI output? Audio?
  
  Also, to make it a little bit harder for the emulator - what about DOOM2 (shareware)? I think you know what I'm thinking of. ;-)
  
  Still, good to see you're still awake and haven't followed the path of many other MS aqcuisitions (sp?)- buy company+product, polish it, release, and then don't bother for several years.
• Anonymous
  August 27, 2005
  The comment has been removed
• Anonymous
  August 27, 2005
  Could you add your system specification as a signature please, and put more data about your virtual pc configuration on each test?
• Anonymous
  August 27, 2005
  Your can play the original DOS Quake under DosBox and you definetly won't have to worry about it going too fast. ;) I think 320x200 you MIGHT be able to get 15fps with the fastest processors around.
  
  Haven't tried it under Qemu lately but it would probably be slightly faster.
  
  But....why would you want to do any of that when you could play the game under the host OS using a port. (Unless of course you like playing DOS Quake then VPC/DosBox/Qemu/Real DOS are your only choices.)
• Anonymous
  September 01, 2005
  Virtual PC Guy:
  <i>I do not know what you are thinking of with DOOM2</i>
  
  I was thinking of the self-modifying code.
  
  DosFreak:
  I know of the ports. Had all software been released with source code we wouldn't have the problem of having to emulate hardware. My question was more to try to understand how fast and efficient (or not) current VPC is.