By James Hanback Very few Sierra On-line Adventure Games from the 1980s or early 1990s featured the type of first-person shooter action later to dominate the PC gaming market. The Sierra adventure gamer had to rely on knowledge, wits, and possibly the printed manual to find the solution. Some games, such as Police Quest, required real-life knowledge about police procedure in order to get past the parking lot at the Lytton, Calif. police station. Conquests of Camelot required research into arcane symbolism, which was helpfully documented within the game’s printed manual, Liber Ex Doctrina. You might also find that you have to rely more on your computer hardware knowledge to complete this stage of our adventure. We will be restoring our game from the previous posts and continuing our quest to use Boson software outside of Windows.
VirtualBox, like Parallels Desktop for Mac and VMware Fusion, can be used to create virtual machines that run Microsoft Windows in a Mac OS X environment. VirtualBox, unlike the commercial products, is open-source software that is released under GNU General Public License. This means that you can freely download, modify, redistribute, and use the software. VirtualBox can lower your total cost-of-ownership (TCO) than a commercial desktop virtualization product if you use it instead VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop. VirtualBox is more difficult to set up for less-technical users. It uses simpler wizards and default settings, which you can bypass to have more control over the creation of VMs. VirtualBox’s less-wizardy approach allows you to easily review its recommended settings and decide at the beginning how much of your computer’s resources will be used for a particular VM, rather than having to adjust those settings after the VM is created.
This is a good opportunity to remind your co-adventurer that their successes and failures using VirtualBox may not be your successes or failures. The entire phase of our quest takes place on a late 2006 Mac Book Pro with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor and Mac OS X 10.7.5. To complete this task successfully, you will need the following inventory:
An Intel Mac with enough RAM for both the host OS as well as any guest OSs you intend to install
VirtualBox needs at least 30 megabytes of hard drive space (MB) and several gigabytes of space (GB) for each guest OS that you plan to install.
Mac OS X – A very modern version
VirtualBox: A copy
A Microsoft Windows installation media (CD, DVD, ISO file, or ISO file) with a valid Windows product key
If you want to install Windows 8, you will need a processor that supports VTX Basic Input/Output System(BIOS) virtualization extensions. If you have an older Intel Mac you may need to update the firmware to enable the VTX extensions.
You can download either the Boson Exam Environment setup or the Boson NetSim Network Simulator set up program depending on which product you are installing.
You should have enough knowledge about your computer’s hardware and software to know when it is safe to adjust VirtualBox settings and when it is best to leave them alone.
Now that you have your inventory, it’s time to get started on the next leg of our journey. Let’s take our adventurer to the next scene.
VirtualBox Installation
VirtualBox is installed on a Mac in the same way as Parallels Desktop or VMware Fusion. First, download Virtu