Virtual PC & FFXI

[gugru55]

I'm not sure if this has been asked or anything but knowing that Vista has severe FPS problems with FFXI, I was curious if using Virtual PC to run XP on my computer would allow me to play FFXI exactly as it would play on XP without the hassle of wiping my vista RAID setup or anything of the sort?

I've downloaded all drivers for vista that supposedly 'fix' the fps issue. Sure it makes it so I'm not at 10fps at the sign of 3 other people but I drop down to 20fps sometimes 16fps constantly in any party. I've set the background resolution to high and to incredibly low (aka ffxi normal) nothing has really fixed this. The game looks like utter ass on the low but runs a bit better, still nothing to be proud of.

I recently came back to FFXI after a long break after christmas. I tried all the drivers the 169 (For ffxi players only) the 174.74 that people say fixed it for them, and even the newest drivers out there, WHQL and beta.

Nothing has worked for me and I know people say "lolvista" however I work on it and would prefer to not have to change it or do as I used to and have to unplug an IDE drive whenever I wanted to go to Vista instead of XP. AFAIK dualbooting requires me to wipe my current setup which I can't do. Any help or suggestions would be most welcome, though I'd like to know if anybody has experience with virtual PC. I'm really just hoping/wondering if it'll work properly with FFXI, since that obviously would be (i assume) the better and easier choice provided it doesn't run at mega low fps or somehow has vista foul-ups.

Edit: Added and older IDE 40GB drive, put XP on it and then repaired my Vista RAID setup's MBR w/ the DVD and used EasyBCD to add XP to the boot list. Now I can easily choose between either OS at the start (basically dual booting but on two physical locations) which is really nice. Now all I have to figure out is which the best drivers are for XP & nvidia 8800gtx. I'll probably just go through the few that I recall the 174.74 and 169.17 (tried the newest bet and it didn't do very well).

[levish]

I believe there's no DirectX acceleration in a VirtualPC currently but I might be wrong, give it a whirl and post back, i'm curious as well.

[Isiolia]

Virtual PC doesn't, VirtualBox (Sun's free product) doesn't, VMWare Server (the free one there) doesn't. VMWare Workstation apparently does, but it's not that great, and it's not free.

Is changing video cards a reasonable option for you? Or have you invested in a higher end nVidia solution? I've had no problems with FFXI on Vista using lower end ATI cards (3200HD and 3650) in my HTPC, though I rarely use it for that. But, if a 4850 or something would be a nice upgrade for you anyway...might be a consideration.

[gugru55]

I've been reading about Virtual PC not having that support as well, it being mainly used for non-gaming applications which I had not previously read. Currently my budget is non-existant, new classes started for college so I don't have any spare change to pop a graphics card in my computer from ATI (Though I'm seriously considering switching to ATI/AMD from here on out, even with Nehalem on the horizon). I honestly am very surprised that NVIDIA after so many long years and 'official' drivers which actually made my FPS *worse* and caused severe artifacting when dual boxing still considers FFXI one of it's "way it's meant to be played" games. I recall having an ATI once in my life and it worked perfectly for FFXI, but then it's fan stopped spinning for w/e reason and it entirely died on me. Ever since then I was turned off to ATI since that was an expensive card and had *just* gone out of it's warranty about 2 days prior.

Does anybody know if ATI/AMD has drastically better support/drivers vs NVIDIA? I'm somewhat confused as to how ATI brings out some of the newest technology, while NVIDIA sticks w/ the older and yet they still end up about even.

Is there really no other way than to just wipe my whole HDD for dual booting? Any help in this regard would be great since it seems one of the only choices. I have an IDE drive I used to use for FFXI, but i always had to plug in the ribbon to play, and put the xp CD in to make it boot (no clue really what's wrong w/ the HDD). Would dual booting be an option that I just choose which OS I want to start up into when I turn my computer on? I apologize for the rather nubbish remarks, I'm mainly confused about the software part of computers, since I can easily diagnose any hardware issues (most of the time) but software perplexes the crap out of me.

Also one of the main issues aside from wiping my vista (which i could do after appropriate backing up) is that I don't have a FDD, since I built the computer for Vista I figured I wouldn't need one as it had native RAID support. XP didn't and I had to scavenge for an old disk drive from an older computer. I have a 1gb usb flash drive, but have no clue how to format it so that it can work as a FDD would. If there's any guides that could dumb it down for me so that I could use the flash drive to help install XP I'd be appreciative.

Sorry about the huge wall of text though, also I did try Virtual PC and it didn't work at all, but that was pretty expected after the responses here. Also about the graphics card, I have(had?) a high-end graphics card, the 8800GTX from NVIDIA, so swapping it for a really low-end ati even if i had the ability would probably make me cry but then again I don't play much else at the moment (until mirror's edge, dead space etc come out) except FFXI. Thanks a lot for the responses.

[Isiolia]

Well, going with AMD isn't really -necessary- just going with an ATI card. Support-wise, I think they're better now, but I was put off on ATI for a while based on some experiences I had back with the Rage 128 era stuff. They're not perfect, nVidia's not perfect, it kinda just flip flops back and forth. Right now, ATI is on top. Next year, who knows.

You could try using BCDEdit in Vista to add your XP install into the boot menu. Vista no longer uses boot.ini. I've not done this myself, but Google has plenty of links about it.

Usually I just use a USB floppy drive if I need drivers in a windows install, so I'm not sure. You could potentially make an XP CD that includes the drivers, nLite would be one way http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLite.

[gugru55]

So I could basically make the Nlite thing have XP and the RAID drivers on it, potentially bypassing any need for a floppy drive and the subsequent diskette therein? Then using the BCDEdit to add the XP install in my boot menu thus allowing to choose which OS I wanted to boot into on startup? I'll give the link and the subsequent information a very good look, thanks for your help I hope this fixes it. PT exp going at 20fps makes everything look like it's going in mega-slow motion.

[Shuemue]

Dude, just ebay the 8800GTX and buy an ATI HD4850. Job done.

[Linktri]

Don't bother with Virtual PC. I own a Mac and Virtual PC with XP. Virtual PC does not support the functions needed to run FFXI. It only runs at 686 speed if I remember correctly. I had to buy a PC to run FFXI on a computer rather than on PS2.

[gugru55]

I've used Nlite to make a XP CD with all the drivers and slipstreamed things I could need. There's no reason for me to ebay a card that I'll get absolute shit price for and get another card in it's stead. 8800gtx and XP work fine w/ FFXI never had a single problem on my older crappier IDE drive. Just with vista.

When i can get the free time to back every important file up, I'll undergo dual booting so that I can install XP and choose which i want to boot up into. Thanks for all the replies, most notably about the Nlite!