I picked up a copy of Parallels a couple of weeks ago at the Apple Store up in Buffalo at Walden Galleria, so that I could play my PC games when I go left for Christmas. I was excited about getting Vista up and running and playing Halo 2 against my bro. The excitement soon faded into pure, unadulterated disappointment.
Parallels Toolbox for Mac and Windows 30+ tools in a lightweight, powerful, all-in-one application for Mac ® and PC. Easy to use and economical—a whole suite of tools for a fraction of the cost of individual apps, packaged in one simple interface. I'm planning to buy Parallels strictly for gaming, there're some games that just run on Windows and this is my chance. I guess if Parallels consumes too much memory or resources so games run smooth and nicely, like there's Parallels consumption plus the game itself.
Parallels was a walk in the park to get running, no problems at all save one – it didn’t play nice with ShapeShifter, so I ignored this app and don’t skin it. After that, it was running in no time. This didn’t really come as a shocker, since ShapeShifter doesn’t play nice with other apps; like iTunes for one. Any way, I get Vista installed, updated and churning right along. Halo 2 went onto the machine just as easy and I had no problems during install. The specs wizrds tossed out a couple of warnings, but I forged ahead. This is where the good feelings get gone.
Right off the bat Halo will not run. At all. Nothing. Initially I figured it was a Direct X thing, and checked around and saw some posts saying that Parallels supports only DX 8.x, but that’s not true – after running dxdiag, I discover I have version 10 installed. Some additional poking around leads me to the answer in that Parallels doesn’t support the 3D video drivers the same way that they are supported natively, and they have their own special video driver. This is what kills me. I can run Quake II Arena, but nothing else so far. I have tried Delta Force Xtreme, and it bombs out saying the video driver is incompatible. So I tried an older version of Delta Force; Black Hawk Down and it won’t start either; even though it only requires Direct X 8. So I figure it might be Vista, and since I can’t run Halo 2 any way – I ace the Virtual HD for Vista and now I am installing XP Pro. Right now in fact.
Games are always a real pain in the jar – especially when you are using them outside of the normal scope of how they were developed. What’s weird though is the Quake II runs perfectly…. So I figure that XP surely can’t be any worse, and in fact will certainly run leaner and meaner on my MacBook Pro than Vista. I have heard tell of folks running Halo 2 on XP Pro with Direct X 9 too – so who knows, I may still get there….
Worse comes to worse, I have Halo for Mac – so I can tool my bro in that for a while before it gets old…..
Parallels has announced the release candidate for the next version of Parallels Desktop for Mac. The final version of Parallels 3.0 is expected to arrive in the next few weeks and will bring support for 3-D graphics as well as two major new features — SmartSelect and Snapshots.
The graphics improvements should be welcome news for gamers as Parallels 3 will offer support for both DirectX and OpenGL graphics in the virtual machine. At the moment Vista's Aero interface is still not supported, though the Parallels site says it's in the works.
Parallels For Mac Gaming Computer
While it remains to be seen how well graphics intensive games perform under the new features, at least Mac gamers will have another possible option.
Of the two major new features the most interesting is SmartSelect which allows users to map files on the Mac desktop so that they automatically open in Windows apps. For instance you can set all your .doc files to open in Microsoft Word 2007 and the virtual machine will launch whenever you double clicking a Word document.
Having to manually launch Windows apps and then open files was the main reason I abandoned Parallels a while back, so I'm look forward to testing the new version when it officially arrives.
Parallel's For Mac
The other noteworthy new feature is Snapshots, which offers the ability to save the state of a virtual machine and roll back to the saved state whenever you get a virus, er, need to.
There are an additional 50 or so new features in the new release, as well as about a 100 bug fixes, which you can peruse in the release notes.
If the announcement alone has sold you, Parallels is offering version 3 at the discount upgrade price of $40 until June 6. After that it'll be $50 to upgrade and $80 for a brand new copy. We'll be sure to give the full rundown when the public release arrives.