Michael,

Thanks for the quick response. I had seen somewhere that build 4560 was supposed to have enabled Parallels to run DirectX 9 so I installed it and tested it. But apparently the person who reported that it was working was in error. Direct Draw works fine but the Direct3D button is not enabled. Guess I'll have to keep my fingers crossed that they'll finally get it sorted out.

MOI is a neat program. The older I get the more I appreciate simplicity in life and straightforward, clean functionality. That's one reason I like Xara better than Illustrator.

Good luck and thanks again.

Brian

Michael,

Closer, but no cigar.

I found that I had not enabled Direct X in the virtual machine. So I enabled it and the Direct3D button lit up. I ran all the tests and they passed for DirectX 7, 8 and 9. When I fired up MOI it came up and I didn't receive the "Unable to create Direct3D9 device" message, however, the portion of the screen that should have been the workspace display was blank (actually it was totally transparent ) and eventually MOI crashed and created a bug report. I forwarded those reports in the event they are helpful.

Looks like the Parallels people have a bit further to go to get it right.

Brian

Hi Brian, thanks for sending the bug reports. That crash is actually happening within Windows system code.

My guess would be that the Direct3D emulation layer has mangled the contents of memory somehow, making things unstable. In their forum there are many other reports of games crashing when trying to run under that system.

When I first heard that they were going to do Direct3D emulation, I was really excited since all of their other emulation layers up until now have been really perfectly done.

But I guess that the other virtualization is done with the help of some CPU features, apparently the video card emulation is done using a different method that is harder to do well.

- Michael