Does anybody here know if it is possible to run a Mac OS X virtual machine on windows 10? Been wrecking my head trying to get it to work the past few days.
If you are willing to do a little more legwork, WINE is almost the same as Crossover and it's free. I've found it's fairly easy to create a 'prefix' (basically a Windows file structure/group of folders), find the folder (just do a spotlight search of whatever you named the prefix), then use WINE to install any Windows applications you want to that folder system. You can either drag the files into the folder system manually, your you can open them with WINE and tell Wine to install the files in that prefix. You can even make aliases of the.exe files and set them to always open in WINE so that you just need to double click on them to get at your games.
WINE is the open source project that Crossover is based on. The money you pay for Crossover goes to fund WINE development. Nothing fishy about it. VMWare and Parallels work fine for DX9 games, but you need a copy of Windows and there is a performance hit from the overhead of running both Windows and OSX, as well as a performance hit from them emulating the graphics card.
If you have a copy of Windows, download a trial and see how it is. In fact, download trials of Crossover and WINE, too.
Pick whatever you like. None of those programs will come with spyware. WINE is the open source project that Crossover is based on. The money you pay for Crossover goes to fund WINE development. Nothing fishy about it. VMWare and Parallels work fine for DX9 games, but you need a copy of Windows and there is a performance hit from the overhead of running both Windows and OSX, as well as a performance hit from them emulating the graphics card. If you have a copy of Windows, download a trial and see how it is.
In fact, download trials of Crossover and WINE, too. Pick whatever you like.
None of those programs will come with spyware. On Mac OS X, Wine is not quite as great as it is on Linux.
This is mainly because Wine is made to use X11 for windowing, which is not Mac OS X's native windowing method. If you use default generic Wine, you will be stuck with everything running under X11.app.
Xquartz X11 is getting better and is rather decent, but Apple's default X11.app is pretty bad. Crossover uses Wine, but tries to make it more user friendly. Its a rather good product, and they custom build their own version of X11 made into it that runs MUCH MUCH better for Wine than Apple's X11 does. I run a project called, which also uses Wine where you can basically port your Windows apps/games over into a stand-a-lone Mac.app application.
It is 'free' as well because its Open Source under the same LGPL license that Wine is. I have a built in X11 in it as well with some enhancements to get around the issues that Apple's X11 has making it much better for gaming than normal Wine or any builds using X11.app.
That said, if you try to use some method that just uses your systems X11, go get the newest version and make sure you use that instead. You'll need that if you use normal Wine (which is actually all command line) or the Wine.app or WineBottler.app builds. I use Xquartz builds for the X11 in Wineskin as well. I didn't really like any of the ways to run Wine on Macs, which is why I started and am still actively working on Wineskin.
I know its not ultra simple. Nothing with Wine is. But if you try it out and can think of anything it needs or ways to make it better, I love input. Everything it is at this point is not totally from my own ideas, I change and make everything to what my users ask for. Another thing to consider.
On my MBP, I've got a BootCamp partition (with WinXP), so I can boot into a thoroughly unsimulated Windows environment, and I also have VMWare, and when initially setting up VMWare I chose some option that made it construct a special VMWare 'image' that points at my BootCamp partition (sorry, don't have the right terms at hand). I've also got a 'normal' VMWare image with WinXP as well.
On my MBP, I've got a BootCamp partition (with WinXP), so I can boot into a thoroughly unsimulated Windows environment, and I also have VMWare, and when initially setting up VMWare I chose some option that made it construct a special VMWare 'image' that points at my BootCamp partition (sorry, don't have the right terms at hand). I've also got a 'normal' VMWare image with WinXP as well.
I’ve never been a Mac fan, but I do have to say that our family does have several Apple products in our home, 2 iPads and an iPhone for the kids and my wife. Whether I like to admit it or not they do make a highly polished quality product. It had been an interest of mine recently to run Mac OS X on my powerhouse PC at home, but I wanted it to run as virtual machine. I raked over some sites that stated it was not possible, I found that rather funny I mean how is it not possible doesn’t Mac run on Intel hardware nowadays anyhow? Then I stumbled on this. It does a good job at showing the basic steps, however it doesn’t explain much along the way, I figured it would be good to break this down and explain it.
Download this (approx. 6 GB), within this file is a file called Yosemite 10.10 Retail VMware.rar, this needs to be extracted to a location of your choice, preferably onto a SSD.
This rar file contains VMware prepped OS X files (vmx, vmdk) for use with VMware products. Install VMware Workstation or VMware Player, I chose the Workstation route since I already had it installed. Confirm VMware Workstation or VMware Player is installed correctly, and close the program. Download the latest, at the time of writing it is. Extract the contents of OS X Unlocker onto your computer.
OS X Unlocker essentially patches the installed VMware product so Mac OS X can be installed. It does this modifying some core VMware system files. Browse to the folder where you extracted OS X Unlocker and Run the following files As Administrator ( win-install.cmd and win-update-tools.cmd) Note: if something goes wrong or you’d like to restore the original files for your VMware application you can run win-uninstall.cmd. Run VMware Workstation or VMware Player and select Open a Virtual Machine. Select the Mac OS X 10.9.vmx file and select Open. Go to Edit virtual machine settings.
Either by right clicking on the Mac OS X 10.9 object on the left side panel or via the tabbed window. You can keep the default resources if you prefer or bump them up, I personally bumped them up to 8 GB and 2 vCPU. The important option here is Version which is on the Options tab. This needs to be set to Mac OS X 10.7. This option is not available by default, the OS X Unlocker we ran earlier has exposed this option. If for some reason you don’t see this option, look at re-running the OS X Unlocker steps, it needs to be Run as Administrator.
Now power on the Virtual Machine using Power on this virtual machine or by right clicking and going to Power Start Up Guest. The machine will boot up and take you through the OS X setup process, it’s very quick and painless. Once complete it’s now time to install the latest VMware Tools onto the newly created OS X VM. You may have picked up on it when we ran win-update-tools.cmd for OS X Unlocker it pulled down the latest and greatest for us to mount and install.
Right click on the Mac OS X 10.9 VM on the left side and go to Settings. Go to CD/DVD and go to Browse and mount the darwin.iso file. Make sure Connected is checked!. The VMware Tools installer should pop right up, just click Install VMware Tools and then reboot upon completion.
If you want to take it a step further to improve the VM performance there is tool called BeamOff which is included in this file we downloaded in step 1. This tool disables beam synchronization which in turn improves OS X VM performance. Mount the Beamoff Tool.iso similarly to VMware Tools in the step previous. Alternately you can download zip and do this yourself if you prefer. Extract the BeamOff application to somewhere on your VM.
Go to System Preferences. Go to Users & Groups. Click on your User account and select Login Items, click the + and browse and select beamoff. At the time of this writing OS X El Capitan is now available, if you want to apply it, go fetch the update from the App Store and install it! Hopefully you found this informative, I found it interesting and thought I should share my experience.