I have a macbook and i was excited when parallels came out because i was awaiting for the arrival of Black and White 2 to come out on the mac. When it came out i bought it, installed it, set up a VM, installed black and white 2 for windows but now i cant play it. The autorun screen comes up but when i hit play, it says that i have the wrong disk in. i have already reinstalled it twice and it still doesn't work. please help!
Couple of things... First of all make sure that the game requirements don't need DirectX, if it does then forget it, you won't be able to play the game. PW supports OpenGL but isn't really going to be a game platform and doesn't support DirectX yet if it ever will.. If you want to play games I would suggest installing BootCamp instead of Parallels. BootCamp will install native MBP drivers etc and will most likely let you play most Windows games. If this game is for OpenGL then try opening up the disk directly and running Install.exe or setup.exe instead of using the autorun feature. None of this may help you, sorry I'm not a gamer anymore and don't know anything of B&W. HTH, Peter
turns out B&W 2 does require dirext x. by the way, why doesn't parallels support direct x? does boot camp?
Because direct X requires access to the video hardware. There is no video hardware support for direct X at this time. Thus no directX support. Bootcamp is not a virtualization solution. It is a boot manager that allows for rebooting your machine in windows. You are running windows natively with native drivers. So no need for virtualization and directX can directly access the video hardware.
Direct X drivers need direct access to the video hardware. Unfortunately MacOS X is using the video hardware and if Parallels tried to access the hardware at the same time your machine would crash. Video hardware doesn't support virtualisation (yet). The Parallels developers have promised a Direct X translation layer in a future version. That means Parallels will emulate a Direct X compatible video card and translate the video hardware instructions from Direct X into MacOS X drawing commands. In the meantime you should setup Bootcamp and run your games there. The performance is exactly the same as a real Windows machine because... well... it is a real Windows machine. The Windows OS has direct access to the video hardware so Direct X works. I finished Half Life 2 using Bootcamp and it was great. Be very careful setting up Bootcamp; follow the instructions on the Apple website exactly or you'll erase MacOS X.
