Has anybody installed a Trainz 12 simulator in a virtual machine environment?

[JonMyrlennBailey]

How well does it perform there?

Tell me about your host OS and your guest OS
as a platform for this.

Why would anybody want to do this?

Easy backup and recovery of installed software.

 

[alexl102]

I tried to install onto XP, running via VirtualBox on a Macbook, with no luck. I think for Trainz it didn't even recognise the disk. All attempts to install various games on it have failed

With regards to why... well, my MB spec is much higher than that of the windows PC I have!

 

[pcas1986]

I have VMWare's Workstation 9 on an Win 7 (64) host with a guest Win 8 O/S. TS12 is installed in the Win 8 installation. This I did ages ago when Win 8 was released to check out Win 8, and see if Trainz ran on it. As I recall there were no problems installing Trainz. I use VMWare Workstation because I like to dabble with Linux occasionally and this is easier than having another computer or using dual booting.

Trainz runs slower as you might expect but faster hardware and more memory allocation to the guest O/S might help. I haven't tried TS12 SP1 on this setup and that might be a challenge given the amount of network traffic SP1 appears to need.

I'd always hoped that VMWare Workstation and similar products might morph into a base O/S hosting a number of guest O/S systems but the current trends of smart consumer driven devices is going in the opposite direction. I suspect its only system/software developers and people like me who use these things.

I back up my Trainz installs and content development files to a cloud device on my private LAN

 

[johnwhelan]

When you install into a virtual environment the environment emulates a PC. So typically it emulate a basic generic machine since anything more exotic needs more work and may need hardware. If your program is CPU bound then it should work reasonably well. If it wants to work with the GPU then the problem is the native machine has the correct drivers for the GPU. However the emulator tells the program it has a generic GPU so you lose performance. Some emulators only allow operating systems running under them access to 2 gigs of memory no matter how much memory is on the machine. Some may not allow access to DVD or CD drives etc because of driver limitations. In the database world databases running on virtual machines do not run well, disk access is one of the weak points.

So the expectation would be that TS12 should run but the frame rates may not be as good as running under native Windows on the same hardware.

Cheerio John

 

[pdkoester]

I would suspect it would allow you to run it, maybe content manager, but the 3D graphics, I find it hard to believe that will work. Just never got anything that uses 3D to work in Virtual Computing.