Virtual PC on a Mac?

Can Guild Wars work on a Macintosh computer? Does anyone have experience with it?

It would very likely be way too slow to play, or wouldn't work at all.

I'm sure it's been done before.

Anyway, it's worth a try, what's the worst that could happen?

Well it will do soon, considering apple are using intel chips, you'll be able to install windows and play whatever you like soon, perhaps their even out now

The Intel Macs are out, but you can't do that yet without extensive messing with both Windows and the Mac. There's an issue with Windows using BIOS and the new Intel Macs using EFI. In other words, Windows will look for BIOS on startup and it won't be there. However, there have been articles on Engadget recently stating that someone finally managed to do it:
http://www.engadget.com/2006/03/16/x...arf-gets-paid/

When Vista, which uses EFI instead of BIOS, comes out this will all probably change.

As for the OP, someone here tried it before with VPC. There was another thread about this a good two or three months ago. The result was that yes, it loaded, but I think it was unplayable. Mad slow.

Yup, was meaning Vista, however someone will get xp working on it before long. The intel macs are not out yet in the UK, they will be any day now though.

Vista 32-bit will not use EFI, apparently.

VPC + GW barely worked on a G5...with video quality settings on very low.

As soon as people figure out how to get ATI drivers to work on the Intel Macs in XP, Guild Wars will be playable on a Mac (dual-boot into XP).

Windows XP SP2 on a new Intel Mac.

CLICK HERE

Yeah some hackers recently won a prize for getting Windows to run on a Mac. That said it would be ridiculously slow at least for now.

Cheaper option would be just to pick up a low cost (by comparison) PC and maybe have some mac emulator on that

Yes, that's nice and all...except ATI drivers don't work on it = no GW for now.

Any idea if someone is actively working on it?

Also, I believe you when you say the drivers don't work, but is there a site that talks about the issue or anything? Does anyone know why the standard catalyst drivers don't work?
(EDIT: Nevermind, I found some discussion about the issue at www.xlr8yourmac.com)

BTW, there is speculation that there will be a VirtualPC build that takes advantage of the Intel CPU and runs Windows (probably Vista) near-native. This might be another option in the future.

I've used VPC on my G4 for some PC applications about 3-4 years ago for non-gaming apps. It worked nicely but ran (unsurprisingly) slow. To get the best performance you'll need tons of memory, of course.

I'm willing to bet that PC gaming is all but impossible. Remember, VPC is only software emulation. It's going to be much demanding on your machine. What are the specs on the Mac?

If someone claims Virtual PC might run Windows "near-native" - I'll believe it when I see it.

I can imagine it (optimized VPC + Intel Mac) be much like my experience on a G5, albeit somewhat better? But somewhat better - VMWare (apparently) works properly under (Intel-Mac) Linux at near-native speeds, whereas VPC (PPC) = *crawl* compared to the former. No, not native, but at least you can load it and fool around and lag.

I'm waiting for the new MacBooks to come out before I buy one, personally...

Xue - The specs on the new Intel iMacs are here: http://www.apple.com/imac/whatsinside.html

The pertinent specs are the 2.0GHz Intel Core Duo (two cores not going to make any difference for GW) and the ATI Radeon X1600 PCI-E which, if you hack WinXP onto the iMac, still won't run with native drivers. Every experience I've had with VPC in the past tells me that the graphics card processing is also going to be hampered by software conversion of some kind.

VPC running "native" on the Intel Macs will probably speed up processor-intensive applications, but I think graphics intensive apps are still gonna suck unless that layer of software interference is removed. When someone figures out how to get the ATI drivers to load in XP on the Intel Mac, as koneko has said, then we'll really see what the deal is.

For the record, I don't expect to be blown away, but I'll be disappointed if games aren't playable.

Oh, latest tidbit about XP on the Intel Macs is that there's no fan driver installed. Not a big deal for the iMacs at the moment, but the MacBooks are going to make your lap mighty uncomfortable.