Need some help finding a good windows emulator for a Mac

[Milton D Moody]

A friend of mine wants to join our FG II game, but she uses a Macintosh, so FG won't work on her computer natively.
Any ideas about relatively simple emulators (She's not very computer literate, so we need to keep it simple) for her to use for implementing FG?

[Malovech]

What version of OS X is she running (if she is running OS X)? Does she have a laptop or a tower?

Right off the bat:

https://www.vmware.com/products/fusion/

But the 3-D support is a bit hit and miss. I can run FG2 with Vmware, but I can't see the dice. Best scenario would be BootCamp + WindowsXP.

[Tokuriku]

One thing I did recently is install the new VMWare Fusion Beta 2 and the dice render nice. There is an issue with the pictures not cropping when resizing the window border though. Even then, using VMWare will suck some RAM and if your using the Mac Book Air like me, you tend to be a little careful plus it can be a little slower then usual.

What I do is use Boot Camp and use XP directly for when I game but I use VMWare (who can emulate from an XP partition directly) when I prepare my games, maps, surf the web so I can use my software on my Mac partition and deposit stuff in my XP partition.

[Ghoti]

I found Threethat work with either PPC or Intel Macs:

First, there is Bochs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bochs), available here (https://bochs.sourceforge.net/).
Secondly, there is VirtualBox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualBox), available here (https://www.virtualbox.org/).
Finally, there is QEMU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU), available here (https://bellard.org/qemu/).

I have not had a chance to see if any or all of these play well with Fantasy Grounds, but I suspect at least one of them should.

[Tokuriku]

Since my last post, I discovered that I had not installed the latest OS update on my new Mac computer. I was on OSX 10.5.2 and thought that the updates would be automatic so I didn't care to check if my operating system was the latest release. Now that OSX 10.5.3 is installed, all is working perfectly in VMWare Fusion! The dice render ok and the pictures get cropped! Woot!!!

By the way, I did some searching around and it seems it would not be that hard to port Fantasy Grounds to Mac even though a lot of people debate about the feasibility of the endeavor. The one thing that stops it is the fact that Fantasy Grounds uses DirectX and that that feature is not available in mac. Well I found CIDER (https://www.transgaming.com/products/cider/), from this (https://www.transgaming.com/) company. What CIDER does is wrap a program in a mac application so that all it needs to function properly under a Mac OS is in there including what is needed to run DirectX.

The best part is that since it's not an emulator, you don't need to install windows at all and with those emulators, you have to pass through windows DirectX. What I understand of CIDER is that DirectX is interpreted in Mac OS language so it can be used directly. Anyways, it is not something you can download or buy, it is sold to companies that want to wrap their windows code into a Mac application.

I don't know for you but I'd pay premium just to be able to run Fantasy Grounds on my Mac natively. Heck I'd buy the whole license again if need be. And pardon me for saying this but even if the computer market is dominated by windows, I'd bet that the number of mac users that are into our hobby compared to windows users might not be so different. The two systems target wildly different user profiles and the mac profile is darn close to an RPG gamer profile in my mind!

[Bidmaron]

I found Threethat work with either PPC or Intel Macs:

First, there is Bochs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bochs), available here (https://bochs.sourceforge.net/).
Secondly, there is VirtualBox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualBox), available here (https://www.virtualbox.org/).
Finally, there is QEMU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QEMU), available here (https://bellard.org/qemu/).

I have not had a chance to see if any or all of these play well with Fantasy Grounds, but I suspect at least one of them should.
Did anyone ever test any of these emulators on a Mac with FG2?

[LancerX]

I can verify from testing over the last week the following:

1) VMWare Fusion 2.0 -- WORKS

2) Parallels 3.0 -- FAILS

3) Crossover 7.1 -- FAILS

In both failed cases the results are as previously reported elsewhere: flickering screen, blacked out images, distorted/crashed graphics, slow performance, etc.