OSX VM with 2D and 3D acceleration?

[cdoublejj]

can you link me to thread where we can discus running Rosetta enable OSXs with HW acceleration in VM/emulation?

Most recent location:
http://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewto ... 065#p45668

I do it via VirtualBox, myself (with 2D and 3D HW acceleration enabled).

Ended up making my own thread because all I really care about is gaining 3D acceleration in an OSX VM mainly 9-10.9. My reasons of interest is story in it's self, the short of it is running PPC apps in any thing later than 10.6 is almost nill, all at that is really known to the entire mac community is running 10.6 server in Parallels and even then there is only software rendering and it's slow and often times photo manipulation software and games are slow assuming they even work and in most cases with crippling bugs.

So I'm interested in learning about setting up OSXes with PPC app support WITH 3D acceleration. where do i start?

[adespoton]

Step 1:
http://www.virtualbox.org

Download the installer and the matching extension pack.
Run the installer, then install the extension pack by double clicking it.

At the main window, click New.
Choose a name (like OS X 10.6)
Select Mac OS X as the Type
Select Mac OS X or Mac OS X 64 bit as the Version (either will work, I use 64 bit, others like 32 bit as it can be more stable)
Click Continue
Choose the appropriate RAM; 2048 is the minimum; if you have 4GB of RAM in your Mac, use 2048; if you have less, you're not going to get decent performance even with graphics accelleration. If you have more, you can bump this up to 4GB if you're planning to use memory intensive software.
Click Continue
Click Continue (this will create a virtual 20GB HD that's a sparse image -- it grows as needed)
Click Continue (you want a VDI image).
Click Continue (you want that sparse image)
Click Create (unless you want a larger max size on your disk image, than use the slider or text entry to set the size)

You now have a virtual machine set up.

Now, if you've already got a Parallels system set up, just click Settings, click Storage, click Controller: SATA, click +(Add Hard Disk) click Choose Existing Disk and select the disk. Then Set it to be SATA port 0 (move the image you already created to some other port first).

Click OK, then click Start.

If you HAVEN'T got a system already set up with Parallels/VMWare Fusion/QEmu/etc., then skip the part about adding the new storage, insert your 10.6 install DVD, and click Start. The installer should start up.

Select Disk Utility from the menu bar when you're able to, format your new disk, then quit back to the installer, and run your installation.

Next bit's important: you're probably going to want to get an account on tonymacx86.com and download iboot + multibeast.

Follow the instructions on http://tonymacx86.blogspot.com/2010/04/ ... -x-on.html. The reason for this is that the most recent updates for 10.6 break VirtualBox's handling of your computer's EFI.

Once you've got all this set up and are updated to the latest version of 10.6 (with security patches), you'll notice your screen resolution is stuck at 1024x768. This can be fixed; I think Multibeast might even have an install option for this if you re-run it.

http://www.macbreaker.com/2012/02/snow- ... albox.html is probably the best way to do everything I've said, and it has pictures. It's meant for non-macs, but works just as well on a Mac, with the added benefit that you get the 2d/3d acceleration that isn't available on Windows.

[cdoublejj]

wouldn't you need a special video card kext for the virtual video card and 3D acceleration? have you tried this with any aftermarket OSX distributions ?

EDIT: hey, if you are like me and have 3 host OSes in a triple boot config, i bet with virtual box if you put the VM guest on an HDD all 3 OSes can use then all 3 oses with VB installed could access and run said VM guest.

[adespoton]

I'm not quite sure what you mean... Vbox just uses the pass through 2D and 3D acceleration provided by the native card; it's not trying to emulate anything here.

No custom Nextel needed if you're trying to run 10.6 on actual Mac hardware; it's all supported by the guest OS.

Of course, if you try this with Linux or Windows as the host, the passthrough's not possible, so sharing the Vm between three hosts will kill the acceleration.

[cdoublejj]

REALL!? Parallels team claims HW acceleration isn't possible with OSX guests because apple won't release the API. so as long as it's on a fully functioning OSX host it's good to go?

It just hands the 2d and 3d protocols to the host's video card? In parallels of VMware the guest OS shows the video cards as Parallels card or VMware SVGA card. I would assume the same happens in OSX 10.6 (for example) guest or does it see the actual card like the host does? host sees gtx480 > guest sees gtx480?

EDIT: let me say i've posted VM and emulation questions all over the hack community and this is un heard of and if it really works with proper 2d and 3d acceleration could help people photo and video editing and even old games. if this is all true and works, this would be very useful information that is worth spreading around.

Now all i need is a good 10.6 disc or image.

[adespoton]

Hmm... after checking through everything again, it appears there is *some* level of acceleration available to software that can take advantage of it, but anything depending on the video driver kext is out of luck -- there's no hardware accelerated driver that works with the VBox SVGA card for VBox either. So while the software can pass through the OpenGL data to/from the guest, the guest doesn't know that there's any acceleration to take advantage of

So unless you write that part yourself, Apple really has prevented host-tyle acceleration on the guest. Grr.

[cdoublejj]

aaahhh so still SOL. well for a bit there, there were some hackers who shoe horned rosetta in to lion but, it didn't work so well. we need a community drive PPC equivalent of wine like program.