>Disk emulation has potential to be very efficient. We can't
>do this with standard 640x480x16color VGA mode though, because
>of those freekin latching modes. Of course, special guest specific
>drivers will take care of this. (Or I suppose the guest could be
>allowed to read/write directly to the real VGA ports/memory if
>we got real spiffy)
My experience with VMWare (I have very little of it, but I do remember this) is
that graphics programs running in DOS, even in 320x200x256, tend to be
*EXTREMELY* slow. In one old DOS game that I tried out to test VMWare
(Gobliins2), I had to wait several minutes for a fade !!! Under windows,
VMWare uses a specialised driver to achieve fast results -- as I understood
it, it uses the X DGA extension and directly maps the relevant piece of
shared memory into the guest address space, so in fact there is direct
communication between the guest and the host window system. Which is FAST.
Though I would still like to have fast "compatibility" modes, if possible,
things like graphics can be best handled in a specialised manner.
-- Ramon
