Ben Armstrong - Running Virtual PC and Virtual Machines | TheChannel9Team

Manip

You know, Microsoft is going to go out of business
before anyone forgets about Bob... I myself would
like to try it, it is VERY hard to get hold of (as he said).

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

We should put that in our recruiting materials then "if you take a job here you can play with Bob all you want." Smiley

scobleizer
I'm the video guy

Beer, Ben's home sick today, but I'll see if he can come and answer these questions.

Yeah, obviously there's some apps that won't run well in Virtual PC. I doubt I'd be using Flight Simulator in one, for instance.

Will Virtual PC change to rock with the new 3D-oriented applications and services like Avalon and video games? Not sure yet. Definitely today's version won't work well for many of those kinds of things.

rhm

Been using VMWare for years to test installation routines on a clean install. Just boot the VM, run the installer, test until you're happy, then quit and roll back and the machine is instantly back to clean again. Much faster than ghosting a new image onto a physical machine which is what we used to do. Plus you don't have to get up from your desk! Smiley

Never tried VirtualPC, but I should imagine it's basically the same as VMWare?

Virtual PC Guy

While virtual machines don't have 'real' DMA resources - we do have emulated ones for all the usually subsystems (along with emulated IO devices).

While we cannot do 3D graphics today we are able to run Windows XP and other modern operating systems quite well.

Cheers,
Ben

ZippyV
Fired Up

So was MS Bob about a virtual house? I remember around '95 some video about a virtual house where you could walk to the desk and you could start the 'desk accessories' like Paint and such. Was it ever released? Or why not?
I got a couple of other questions for this video:

Is that a white toaster in the background?
What's in the envelope?

And know the final question:

Why doesn't VPC support polymorphic x86 code?

Edit: more questions:

Is there a difference between i386, i486 and i586?

Virtual PC Guy wrote:
While we cannot do 3D graphics today we are able to run Windows XP and other modern operating systems quite well.

And Sim City 4?

TimP

I'm glad you got an interview with Ben. His blog is one of my favorites. Will there be more interview segments?

Virtual PC Guy

To answer your questions:

1) Yes - it is a toaster (cost me $9), which is actually a violation of Microsoft policy - however I got an exception because I am alergic to wheat (gluten - actually) and can't use communal toasters

2) I believe that it was a contract that I needed to review - however I can't tell you any more than that Smiley

3) It should do - we have code to detect and handle polymorphic x86 code (it is used more often than you might guess)

4) Virtual PC 'virtualizes' the processor - so you will get whatever architecture you have on the physical computer (but we only support CPUs of the i686 family).

And funny that you should mention Sim City 4 - but it does actually run fine inside of Virtual PC and I am planning to post to my blog about this on Wednesday.

Cheers,
Ben

Minh
WOOH! WOOH!

Beer28 wrote:

Something that relies on GL drivers from NVidia like Looking Glass Desktop that needs real 3d acceleration wouldn't be able to run right?

He said the virtualized video card is the S3 Trio, so whatever video card you actually has, the VirtualPC machine thinks it has a S3 Trio. Not sure if S3 ships OpenGL drivers with it -- but if they did, then you should be able to run apps that make use of OGL.