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Although virtualization is the safest and most convenient way to run Boson software in a primarily non-Windows environment, there are significant performance benefits to installing Windows on its own physical hard drive partition so that it accesses your computer’s hardware directly instead of communicating with it through a layer of virtualization software.įor Linux users, installing an additional OS on its own partition primarily consists of using a utility like Gnome Partition Editor (GParted) to repartition the hard drive, installing the additional OS on the new partition, and then configuring a boot loader like GNU’s Not Unix (GNU) GRand Unified Bootloader (GRUB) or Microsoft’s NT Boot Loader (NTLDR) to enable the user to choose which OS to load at startup.
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#Boson netsim 11 for mac os x install
In the previous four blog posts in our quest to install Boson software in non-Windows environments, we’ve explored ways to virtualize Windows on a Mac (or on Linux, if you are so inclined) so that you can use Boson software without entirely giving up your operating system (OS) of choice. So it goes with installing Microsoft Windows directly on your non-Windows computer’s hard drive instead of using a desktop virtualization solution. Thus an internal hard drive equaled smoother and faster play. However, no Sierra game ever ran better than when it was installed on the computer’s internal hard drive, which was not only capable of accessing data faster than removable media but also didn’t require you to swap said media mid-scene. Ultimately, the latest of the Sierra games, which had evolved from pixelated animation and Musical Instrument Digital interface (MIDI) music to movie-style live action video and sound, came packaged on CDs. Your humble co-adventurer’s first PC didn’t. Most of the games from the late decade could also be installed on your computer’s internal hard drive if you were lucky enough to have a computer that included such a device. Slightly later in the decade, you could buy Sierra games that included both 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch floppies, because there was a time, dear younglings, when computing folks had either a 5.25-inch floppy drive or a 3.5-inch floppy drive installed in their PCs, but not necessarily both. Your humble co-adventurer’s earliest Sierra adventures were packaged on a series of 5.25-inch floppy disks. If you’re lucky enough to have some old Sierra On-line adventure games lying around your place, you might notice that together they tell a pretty good story about the evolution of computer hardware and storage media from 1980 all the way through the end of the 1990s.
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