VirtualPC is a program of Connectix which allows you to emulate a PC on your MAC.

The VirtualPC program

The installation is extremely easy. You just follow the steps of the installer and you have a working version of Windows95 on your Mac. Since VirtualPC emulates the working of the Intel chip (plus sound card, plus video card) everything works fine. In a sense it is easier to work with VirtualPC than with a real PC machine since all the settings are done through the VirtualPC emulator.

Testing the pinballs

A major drawback of VirtualPC: it does not distinguish between left and right shift keys. This is a Mac related difficulty but since VirtualPC is meant to create a PC inside your Mac it should have taken care of this problem already in this version. I intend to contact Connectix and ask that they provide a fix for this problem. As a result of the non-differentiation of left and right shift keys and since most PC pinballs use these keys for the flippers one cannot play them correctly. (Of the PC pinballs in my possession: Pinball Arcade, Pinball Dreams, Pinball Fantasies, Extreme Pinball and Royal Flush only the first allows the player to remap the flipper keys. This is something one should talk about to the developers of pinball simulations).

Conclusion

The main conclusion concerning playability: everything works VERY slowly. I guess that the speed is not better than that of a 20 MHz machine. Royal Flush has the extra problem that the ball disappears most of the time which makes the game certainly non playable. All the tests were performed on a 3400 Powerbook with a 180 MHz 603e processor. One would probably obtain better performances out of a faster machine (but the faster in my possession is a 9500 with a 132MHz 604 processor).

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A final critique on PC pinballs: I find that scrolling destroys the game. (But probably scrolling pinballs are not produced anymore). On the other hand this is not the only feature that destroys a game: lack of ideas is the worst thing and we are seeing this all too often in the pinball simulation world (both for PC's and Mac's).


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