virtualbox.org

Hello,

Every year, I'm doing a LAN Party with some of my friends. To avoid spending hours just to setup games, we decided to play games in a virtual machine. We did experiment this kind of setup successfully on VMware with both MAC and Windows host.

This year, we would like to try it with virtualbox. The guest I'm working on is a Windows XP 32 bit / 2 Processors / 4Gb RAM / 128Mb Video. My host is a Windows 7 64 bit Intel I7 Q720 @ 1.6 GHz / 8Gb RAM / ATI Mobility Radeon HD 4650... it's not a gamer machine but it give me descent performance and it's more than enough to play old game like-half-life 2.

I just installed VB 5.0 and most of the games are working perfectly... the only problem I have is with Half-life 2 which is really laggy. I already set the video settings to the lowest to see if it would help but it still lag (even with a 800*600 resolution). I did enable 2D/3D aceleration and installed the 3D support on the guest... the problem still occurs. I may be wrong but I already tested that game a while ago in VirtualBox 4 and I think it was working correctly so I'm wondering if there's a way to improve VirtualBox 3D performance to make this game playable.


P.S. YES I know the games COULD be installed on the host... but this ain't what I want to do here.
P.S.2 I tried the exact same setup in VMWare and the game run just fine... so I think this should confirm this ain't an host performance issue.

VB 5.0 is brand-new. If you really want to get XP running on 7 hosts, feel free to go back to the version 4 that worked. Version 5 has new features you probably won't need for a LAN party and is shooting to support Windows 10. Hosts & guests up to 8.1 are good on version 4.
Note that 4.3.12 is the last version of Virtualbox which doesn't have the Windows host security hardening. This will be important for your guests who may have antivirus, hacked themes, unsigned drivers, etc. All these may cause 4.3.14 & later Virtualbox to not run, leading to a pretty bummer party. Just be sure the PCs don't have malware on them and you'll be okizzay.

you'll be okizzay

So sayth Mr. Binks

More like Marty:

For the record, I tried with those versions:

5.0.0
4.3.30
4.2.32

Unfortunately, I wan't able to get a decent gaming experience. I still have to admit the gaming experience has really improved in VB since a couple of years and this is promising... I don't know if we could expect some 3D support improvements in a near future so for know, I'll have to stick with VMWare.