Hans-Joachim Metzger wrote:

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I've been experimenting with running Virtual PC 4.3 under XP to find out whether or not I'd be able to make full use of my Pentium4 2 GHz/512 MB RAM machine to accelerate Fractint fractal calculations.<<<

Thank you for posting your experience with Virtual PC! I have not yet tried it, but I have a few comments.

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Having applied the makefcfg utility to sort out possible VESA problems with my NVidia GeForce4 MX 460 graphics card, I have been able to generate the following resolutions for Fractint (running under DOS under Virtual PC under Windows XP):<<<

Did you run makecfg in Virtual PC DOS? I'm almost certain that is the correct thing to do. The VESA modes on your NVidia don't matter at all in Virtual PC. It simulates all the DOS/VESA graphics in software (using DirectX). It simulates an S3 card, so Fractint thinks it is running on an S3. Has anybody written a fractint cfg entry for 1600x1200 for the S3?

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Even calculations of 640x480x256 fractals turned out to be considerably slower than on my Pentium III 700 and 800 MHz PCs. Maybe, there is a way to reconfigure DOS under Virtual PC. I have applied old autoexec.bat and config.sys values from way back when I was really still using DOS, but could not achieve any signficant accelerations.<<<

You should try Virtual PC 5.0. Many people complained that version 4 was slow and they claim to have greatly speeded it up in version 5.

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Has anyone ever tried VMware Workstation? Since it is a virtual machine software letting you run multiple operating systems (like, for instance, Windows and Linux) on a single piece of hardware, maybe it is more useful for running Fractint on modern machines than Virtual PC is.<<<

VMware is very similar to Virtual PC in the way it works. They concentrate more on enterprise features, e.g., they have better support for networks and SCSI devices. It also costs $100 more. However, I don't think their DOS support is as good. They may not support VESA or SVGA at all. It is unclear from their web site. Nick