VMware Fusion vs VirtualBox vs Darwine vs Boot Camp vs Parallels vs CrossOver Mac

A good friend asked me a couple days back what I thought was the best solution when it comes to running Windows applications on his new X86 Mac. The first thing I ask him was, is their a equivalent native application that will do the job for you? As I have always believed native applications and games are always the best solution in the end. His reply was ummm... no not really, so I thought I would dig around and see what solutions were available at this time to run Windows applications on a x86 Mac.

In my opinion the best virtualization solution would be xen but if you read the EULA in OS X it forbids virtualization. So until the fine folks at Apple Inc change their minds about virtualization xen is going to be out of the question.

But this solution isnt without its problems, their would still be the intigration problems and you would require a windows license.

If your looking at a pure emulation solution their is only Wine and CrossOver Mac, Wine is free and open source but what its not is user friendly! In my opinion CrossOver is a good choice if it supports the applications or games that you use on a daily basis. This does not have to mean official support from CodeWeavers, as their are a large number of unsupported applications and games that work at this time but their not officially supported, in the end it comes down to does CrossOver run the applications and games that I have and need? And the best thing about going with a CrossOver solution is your not sending a single cent to sunny Redmond and your helping fund further Wine support.

Parallels could be classified as something of a hybrid solution as they use Wine libs for their 3D acceleration.

Q. A completely rewritten cocoa port of QEMU, built directly on OS X, making use of Apples Core-technologies like Coreimage, Coreaudio and OpenGL for in- and output, saving the overhead of crossplattform APIs like SDL, FMOD or GTK.

Here is a Hak5 video review of Q running multiple OS's on a PPC.

Q. pronounced cue (/kju/): PC emulator
+ open-source GPL
+ Performance meter which shows the harddisk, CPU and CD-Rom activity.
+ You can easily create and run guest operating systems with Qcontrol.
+ runs Linux and Windows (including Vista)
- ALPHA software
- requires a Windows license


VMware Fusion let's you run multiple operating systems, including Windows, Linux, and Solaris, on your Macintosh at the same time as Mac OS X – without rebooting. Designed from the ground up for the Mac, VMware Fusion allows you to run Mac and Windows applications side-by-side – quickly and effortlessly sharing information between the two operating systems’ environments.

The following video shows Windows Vista Ultimate on MAC OS 10.4.8 with VMWARE FUSION

VMware Fusion: virtual machine
+ USB 2.0 and most USB devices, CD/DVD drive support
+ drag-and-drop between environments
+ Run multiple Fusion environments at once or assign multiple processors
+ You can partition with Boot Camp, and then run Vmware Fusion off of the Boot Camp Partition. then use macdrive to keep your data in sync between multiable systems.
+ Run your Windows apps as Mac apps with Unity (video).
+ Support for DirectX 8.1 inside a virtual machine (video).
+ Save and restore the virtual machine state with snapshots.
+ Support for 64-bit OSes inside a virtual machine: harness all the capabilities of your Mac processors.
+ Performance: run your favorite benchmarks.
+ Ultra-low price: you can currently pre-order it for $ 40.
- requires a Windows licence


VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

The following video shows Windows XP and Mac OS X at the same time with VirtualBox.

Virtualbox: virtual machine
+ Free for personal use
+ open-source GPL
+ modular design, Remote Desktop Protocol support, and shared folders
+ runs Linux and Windows (including Vista)
- requires a Windows license


The Darwine project intends to port and develop WINE as well as other supporting tools that will allow Darwin and Mac OS X/ppc users to run Windows Applications, and to provide a Win32 API compatibility at application source code level.

Wine/Darwine: emulation libraries in place of Microsoft libraries.
++ Does not require a Windows license
+ open-source LGPL
- significant problems with a large number of programs
- poor audio support
- not user friendly


Boot Camp creates a partition just for Windows without erasing your existing any of Mac OS X information. Boot Camp also burns a CD with drivers for Windows so you can use your Mac's built-in graphics, USB, audio, Bluetooth, Ethernet, AirPort, and more. The drivers are automatically installed when you insert the disc into your Mac after you install Windows.

The following video shows Windows Vista on Intel Mac mini with Boot Camp.

Boot Camp: Native Windows install
+ Free included in Mac OS X
+ most complete hardware support
+ runs apps at native system speed
+ All Applications and Games work
+ Full OpenGL & DX support
+ Boot Camp will burn a CD of all the required drivers for Windows so you don't have to search the Internet looking for them.
- frustrating to reboot, and you can't run Mac and Windows applications at the same time.
- requires a Windows license

Parallels Desktop for Mac enables you to run Windows, Linux, and more side-by-side with Mac OS X on any Intel-powered Mac, without rebooting. With Parallels’ virtualization technology, you can run Mac OS X and your favorite Windows applications at the same time. You can even drag-and-drop files between desktops.

The following video shows Parallels hardware-accelerated 3D Graphics in action.

Parallels: Virtual machine and emulation
+ 15 day trial available
+ Coherence features makes integration much simpler.
+ Parallels Compressor - a tool that is included in Parallels save from 35 to 50% disk space.
+ OpenGL & DX 8.1 support
+ saved state support with Snapshots
+ full-screen switching built-in
+ you can cut and paste between the two environments and set-up shared folders.
- somewhat costly
- resource intensive needs allot of RAM, slightly reduced CPU performance, and much lower disk performance.
- Limited game support, uses Wine D3D libs for game support
- requires a Windows license


CrossOver Mac allows you to install many popular Windows applications and games on your Intel OS X Mac. CrossOver includes an easy to use, single click interface, which makes installing Windows software simple and fast. Once installed, your application integrates seamlessly in OS X. Just click and run your application directly from the OS X Finder. Clicking a Windows file or document — including email attachments — will launch the appropriate Windows program, allowing you to work on the files. Best of all, you do it all easily and affordably, without needing a Microsoft operating system license.

The following video was shown at the Macworld Expo, and gives you a quick visual sense of what CrossOver Mac can do.

CrossOver Mac: emulation libraries in place of Microsoft libraries.
+ 30 day trial available
++ Does not require a Windows license
+ runs apps at native speed
+ OpenGL & DX 8.1 support
+ you can copy/paste (limited to text) save/read between the two environments.
- possible problems with unsupported applications browse the CX compatibility center for more information on what currently works.
- Limited game support, uses Wine D3D libs for game support
- poor audio support
- No Dock or Command+Tab integration for individual applications

Yukon the OpenGL video capturing framework

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First Post

This Page Has Been Moved: Please Note the New Location Below

We restructured the whole site and this page no longer exists on this location. The page that your looking for has been moved to a different Web address on the new and improved Wine-Reviews.net Site:


Click on the link above to go to the new location. (To maintain accessibility, we have not set up automatic redirection to the new page.) If you have a bookmark to the old page, please change it to the new address above. If you followed a link from another Web site to this page, please let the people responsible for that Web site know the new location above. If you are having trouble finding the information you want, do a search on this article at our new site.

Thanks for your understanding and Sorry for the inconvenience.

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Benchmarking Wine 1.1.2

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3DMark 2000 v1.1

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CrossOver and Boot Camp Review

The ability to use Windows application on the new Intel Macs is a great marketing strategy and buying point for several switchers now. There are several solutions available now and I go into some detail about the latest one to hit the market by Codeweavers in this episode.

Codeweavers CrossOver for Mac is still a beta release. However, it seems to be a solid beta release and with the promise of new features to be added and more applications to be officially supported by the time we see a final release, this product looks like it will shape up to be a serious contender in the growing Windows virtualization sector of the Mac software community.

Essentially, you can get most of the same basic functionality of this product for free from an open-source project called Darwine, which is a port from the Linux project WINE for Mac OS X. I have tried using Darwine before, including using this same application, but I wasn’t successful in getting it working. So, my experience with CrossOver for Mac was much better, but the open-source alternative (on which CrossOver is based) is available if you’re a tinkerer.

CrossOver and Darwine are described as a Windows API compatibility layer on top of the host OS. What makes this solution different from a complete virtualization solution like Parallels Desktop is that instead of having to run a full OS, like Windows XP, with all it’s services and processes, you are just going to be running the application. CrossOver will fool the application, in our case DVD Shrink, to believe that it is running on a Windows 2000 installation, and with a very few small exceptions, it runs withtout a glitch right beside all of our other Mac OS X applications. That being said, this is the holy grail in some respects, but the worst thing to happen for Mac developers in others (think “Let’s just write Windows software, they can always just run that on a Mac with CrossOver….”).


CrossOver for Mac
So let’s get started using DVD Shrink for Windows on our Mac! Of importance in this tutorial is the fact that you don’t have to have an Intel Mac to get this working as far as I can tell, although I haven’t tested it on a PPC one yet. (I’m not exactly sure what I was thinking here. Yes, WINE ran just fine on Linux, but it was Linux x86, not Linux for PPC. Therefore, CrossOver is for Intel Macs only, although I can’t find that on their website easily. First, you’re going to need to download and copy the CrossOver application to your Applications folder (or where you keep your apps). Download CrossOver Beta 1 here. Now, fire up CrossOver for the first time. You’re going to get a box begging for financing every time you launch the app, register if you wish to support the effort and get in on lower intro pricing (like what Parallels did). If not, just click “Continue”.

Now we need to install a piece of software. We’re going to be working with a program for Windows called DVD Shrink. This piece of software lets you take a DVD that is larger than the standard 4.7GB and shrink it to fit on that size disc, allowing you to make a backup copy of a commercial DVD. (NOTE: I do not condone or suggest that you use this tuturial as a way to break the law. Only copy or backup DVDs that you own and don’t distribute those).

Once you have downloaded DVD Shrink, you need to unzip the zip archive. You will now see a program labeled “dvdshrink32setup.exe” on your Desktop with an icon with some gears and the CrossOver logo. If you double-click this, it should launch CrossOver, even if the program isn’t currently running. However, I recommend (just because I haven’t tested installing something that way) to go through the “Install Software” feature inside of CrossOver. Use the “Configure > Install Software” feature to bring up a window like the one below. The list of supported software isn’t very long (there is an online list as well that you can talk with other people about your experiences with a certain piece of software), so we’re going to use the “Install Unsupported Software” button in the bottom left-hand corner of the window.


Click “Continue” in the next window. The next window is informing you that installing software that isn’t officially supported has a good chance of messing up what you already have installed and working. If you follow the suggestions, then you can create a new “bottle” which is essentially a little container where your application thinks it’s running in Windows. For this tutorial I haven’t installed anything before, so I had to create a new bottle to start with. It’s up to your discretion whether you’d want to keep using different bottles for every program or not. I’m not sure what the effects on hard drive space and the like would be.


The next window that appears lets you choose the installer that you’re going to use. This is the “dvdshrink32setup.exe” file that we unzipped on our Desktop. Choose the left option in the window and then browse to that file and click “Continue”. From there it will launch the actual DVD Shrink install program for you to install with. Use all of the default options until you are finished with the installer.

Once you have that installed, go back into CrossOver and go to your “Programs > DVD Shrink > DVD Shrink” menu to start the program that we just installed. It will launch the program and then we can get started backing up a DVD. I won’t go into much detail here because there are numerous tutorials available on the net about using DVD Shrink. Use Google and find those. I’ll mention just a few quirks with the program here because they are related to CrossOver and the Mac.


You won’t be able to access the disc itself in this program. CrossOver doesn’t let the program see the physical drive itself. This being said, you won’t be able to use the built-in burn functionality either. You’re going to need some free hard drive space to get this accomplished because we’re going to be copying the entire DVD uncompressed to you hard drive (from 4.7 up to almost 9GB in some cases), then we’re going to encode it in DVD Shrink (I’m assuming that takes up some space somewhere) and then we’re going to create another 4.7GB disc image.

To access your DVD, you’re going to need an application that will “rip” the DVD to your hard drive. There are a few solutions available for Mac, the most used being MacTheRipper. (I’m not linking to that here for copyright violation issues. However, you can find it on Version Tracker or MacUpdate). Rip your DVD to your hard drive and it will create a folder with the name of your DVD and in that it will have a “Video_TS” folder. That’s all good. (Recommend placing this on your Desktop as it will make locating it easier later).

Now, back in DVD Shrink, we need to open up the DVD we just ripped to the hard drive. Click the “Open Files” button back in DVD Shrink and we’ll have to browse for the “Video_TS” folder that we just ripped to the drive. If you placed this on your Desktop, you can use the “My Mac Desktop” folder in the file browser for easy access. If not, finding it is going to be a pain. Your hard drive shows up a few different ways in the browser (Your home folder as well as the root of the drive) and if you have stored it on an external disc, you would have to use the “/” and then “Volumes” to be able to find the name of your disc. This is very confusing for some Mac users because they have never seen folders with that name before. If you’re interested in why you are seeing that, read more up on Unix and it’s underpinnings in Mac OS X.

Now that we have successfully opened our DVD, you can change a bunch of settings to tweak the compression on your extras, languages, sub menus and more. You want the whole bar across the top to be green, saying that it will fit onto one disc just fine. Once that is done, we’re going to want to “Backup” our DVD. After clicking the “Backup” button, you have a couple options to save our work. You can either save it as a Disc Image which we can later simply burn to a DVD using Disk Utility, or you can save it to a folder, which will create another Video_TS folder, which you would need something like Toast, or LiquidCD (which is very nice and free, I’ll be talking about it in another episode) to be able to burn to DVD.

With whatever option you choose, you now have a working version of the disc you started out with, except that you have it on a smaller, regular DVD now. If you’re confused about how to burn a disc image using Disk Utility, you need to open Disk Utility (Applications/Utilities) and open an image from the “File” menu. Then select that image in the left-hand pane and click the “Burn” button to burn the image. You can also do this with several other applications, but this is an easy way as well.
I hope that everyone has had success with DVD Shrink and can now sit back in wonder at what you’ve accomplished. Be sure to send me emails and talk to me on AIM if you have any questions about the topic and I’ll get back to you shortly.

Boot Camp
I was originally going to do an in-depth review of Boot Camp here as well, but after looking around the net for awhile, I realized that there is already several hours worth of reading available for people to read. That said, I was pretty impressed with the painlessness of the whole process and I didn’t have any problems getting Windows XP SP2 installed on my Macbook. My whole obsession with this started because I was going to place and boot XP from my external USB drive, but not having time to get this accomplished right now, I settled for trying this out. If you have a need for better video and graphics support (such as games!!) than what Parallels provides, than this is a pretty cool solution. It’s also free and will be bundled in with Leopard itself when that finally launches. Key thing to remember is to just backup your data before you get started, and that you can’t use any disc except a full install, no upgrade discs.

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