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New versions of these popular virtual machines (also known as emulators) have recently come about. In our old comparison we took a look at 4 games, and we do the same again here. Last time, VMWare Fusion was the winner. This time… it’s Parallels. You’ll see why as you read ahead.

VMWare Fusion 3 and Parallels 5 were tested, using a Windows 7 Professional 32-bit virtual machine. Windows 7 was chosen because both Fusion and Parallels now support it, and with XP being continually phased out (and Vista being bloated), it’s the operating system that most people are likely to choose.

So without further ado, let’s take a look at the 4 games chosen this time around. I’ve packed the screenshots at the front with a tiny explanation, and if you scroll down a bit further (about 1/2 way through the article, you’ll see the actual writeup.

Mass Effect (click to see full size):

Both actually had the error message you see on the right. After playing with the Windows Compatibility mode stuff, I managed to get to the error message on the left.

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Halo CE (click to see full size)

The left side (Parallels) was nice and fast – the 59 FPS you see was the lowest it got, and that was just for the screenshot. Not so on the right side (Fusion) – it looks like snow in the right image. It’s just missing textures. At a whopping 2 fps.

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Knights of the Old Republic 2 (click to see full size):

Both were very playable, but Parallels offered a perfectly smooth experience. Fusion played quite well, but crashed in the “Advanced Video” option menu.

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Cities XL (click to see full size)

Just Parallels is shown, because Fusion only lasted about 5 seconds – not enough time for a screenshot.

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Now for a little detail… We’ll start with a disappointment, and then cheer everyone up a little with Read more…

It’s do-able. That said, it wasn’t fun.

I’ll try to walk through the steps it took. Much of this is done by memory, but I just finished, so it’s fairly fresh in my mind (although I’m rather sleep deprived at the moment so bear with me).

It’s worth noting that I used an ATI 4850 video card. If you go with an nVidia card, it may be a lot easier (try it on your own before paining yourself with this process).

Network, video, sound (at least 2-channel anyway), microphone are working. Sleep isn’t (so disable it in the Energy Saver section in System Preferences)

The stuff you might need:
-Retail Snow Leopard disk (hopefully you’ve bought it already)
-An existing install, or Rebel EFI otherwise (it’s a free download).
-USB hard drive or USB memory stick
-the MyHack installer
-Netkas’s PC EFI v10.5
-Voodoo HDA
-Kext Helper

Huge thanks to each of the Read more…

A couple CPM advertisers I’ve run on the Warcraft-Maps site were Burst and ValueClick. I ran a few others as well although they were lesser-known names and I dropped them because not only did they not pay well, but they ran some questionable ads.

Last year I had a little surprise in that Warcraft-Maps.com was listed as an attack site. Turned out that either Burst or ValueClick were running some not-so-nice ads and got the site flagged. It did eventually un-flag, but I wasn’t thrilled.

I always thought ValueClick was the problem. They’ve got a huge amount of ads running on their network, and they don’t seem as selective as Burst!. You can imagine my surprise a few minutes ago though, when Kaspersky did the little “violin” when I visited my site. Turned out Burst doesn’t behave so well after all. Read more…