Question about virtualizing Vizard

[JMOwens]

Hi,
I'm having some trouble running Vizard on my Macbook, and I was hoping to get some input from you wise folks. I have Windows XP Pro installed on my Boot Camp partition, and when I boot into Windows, Vizard works just fine. However, what I'd really like to do is run Vizard from VMWare so I don't have to reboot just to run this sofware.

The problem is, while I can open Vizard fine, when I try to run a script I receive the following error message:

Producer::VisualChooser: unable to setup a valid visual with WGL extensions, switching to compatibility mode

My computer has a 2.2 GHz Core2Duo processor and 4GB of ram, so I don't think it's a resources issue. Does anyone have any ideas how I might be able to get around this? I don't care if scripts run at top framerate or anything; I'm using Vizard on my laptop primarily for development. Thanks!

[farshizzo]

We don't have any experience with getting Vizard working with VMware. Another user was trying to get Vizard/VMware working in this thread (http://www.worldviz.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1325). You might want to ask them if they had any luck with it.

[JMOwens]

Thanks, I will. In the meantime, can you give me any more information about what that error message means? I couldn't find anything in the Vizard help menus. If I can figure out what the problem is, that may help in resolving it.

[farshizzo]

This error means Vizard could not create a valid OpenGL window. This is usually caused by old or bad OpenGL drivers. VMware runs OpenGL in software emulation mode, so this is mostly likely the cause of it.

[JMOwens]

Hmm, apparently VMWare Fusion does not play so nice with OpenGL, according to their forums. Great. If anyone out there in forumland has gotten Vizard to work correctly on a mac with either VMWare or Parallels, please let me know! Thanks.

[billjarrold]

You asked if anyone had any experience using vizard with parallels....

In short I have a somewhat positive experience to report.

Here are some details: I was at the Mac Store about 2 weeks ago. I asked the store people to show me a machine with parallels on it. They took me to a big iron desktop machine. I tried to install the vizard demo thing, it needed some sort of password which a Mac store person typed in for me. I had the vizard demo running in minutes. It worked fine. I hit the f4 (or was it f3?) button to get frame rate but this button was not behaving like a window$ machine. No one in the mac store knew how to make it work so as to give me frame rate. Nonetheless, it looked pretty smooth to me. Thus, despite what the common received wisdom I have heard (i.e. "Oh, no, don't try parallels or VMWare, you must use the much faster bootcamp approach to running Window$ on your mac if you want a decently fast vizard") this seems to (weekly) suggest that at least a big iron (sorry I don't remember the precise details) desktop mac is plenty fast to run vizard virtually.

I am keenly interested in running vizard using parallels for *development* purposes. No worries if it is too slow to, e.g., run an HMD. Does anyone have any good or bad experiences running vizard using parallels on a mac laptop?