That means there may be times when you need to run the Microsoft OS: perhaps there’s an application your company uses that’s only available for Windows, or you’re a web developer and you need to test your sites in a true native Windows web browser. Rather than an emulator or virtual machine, it is a reimplementation of Win32 API.Despite the Mac’s recent gains in market share, Windows is still the dominant operating system, especially in businesses. It converts Windows API calls to POSIX calls, thus allowing integration of Windows applications to POSIX-compliant OS (Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and BSD). Wine is a compatibility layer between Windows programs and the operating system.Before we list the best Windows emulators for Mac, let’s understand how it works.1. There are plenty of such apps available for Mac OS, which work great. Whatever your reason for running Windows, there are a number of ways your Mac can do it for you.To run Windows apps on a Mac computer, you will need an emulator or a virtualization tool.Improve this question.Using a program called VirtualBox, you can run Apples OS X on your Intel-based PC. So my question is: Is there a good GBA emulator out for OS X Lion No PPC apps please. Especially the lack of a good Game Boy Advance emulator is bugging me.You could use Apple’s own Boot Camp, which lets you install Windows on a separate partition of your hard drive. I recently attempted to download a PlayStation emulatorspecifically PCSX Reloadedon my iMac running OS X Lion and what I thought was going to be a 10-minute task became a 1-hour excursion as I had to search through various forums and torrent sites for proper instructions and necessary plug-ins.If you need a more flexible, full-fledged Windows installation, you still have several other options. (CrossOver’s vendor, CodeWeavers, maintains a list of compatible apps.)Installing emulators isn’t easy, and I learned this the hard way.
So instead of picking one program over the other based on how well it performs a given task, the choice now hinges on some more subjective factors. This time, however, that task-based approach didn’t work, largely because (with a couple exceptions that are noted below) the latest versions of Fusion and Parallels Desktop are nearly indistinguishable in performance. Which leaves Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion as your best alternatives.So, of those two, how do you decide which one is right for you? In the past, I tried to answer that question by comparing virtualization programs head-to-head, to see how they did on specific tasks. And while VirtualBox is free, setting it up is complicated—downright geeky, at times—and it lacks some bells and whistles you might want. But you have to reboot your system to use Boot Camp, so you can’t use it at the same time as OS X it’s Mac or Windows, but not both. IPhone and iPad users can use their CAC and access CAC enabled websites using several.Of those four options, Boot Camp offers the best performance your Mac is wholly given over to running Windows. Windows Emulator Lion Windows 7 On AParallels Desktop was faster than Fusion in some individual tests, Fusion was faster in others, and in the rest the differences were almost too close to call.The third big difference: If you want to explore operating systems other than Windows, Fusion offers a much broader universe of alternatives. Macworld Labs ran both programs through PCWorld’s WorldBench 6 benchmark suite, and the results were close: overall, VMware Fusion beat out Parallels Desktop by a very slight margin (113 to 118, meaning Fusion was 18 percent faster than a theoretical baseline system, Parallels Desktop 13 percent). You can, of course, use them to run other operating systems—including OS X Lion itself—but that’s not the focus here.As noted, both Parallels Desktop and Fusion perform well when it comes to running Windows 7 on a Mac. For example, VMware is currently offering Fusion at a promotional price of $50. (Desktop can use VMware’s appliances, but they must first be converted to the Parallels format it doesn’t really seem fair to give the program full credit for that capabiity, if it’s reliant on the VMware ecosystem.) So you want to explore the wild world of operating systems and applications, Fusion is the way to go.So much for the three categories with relatively clear winners now for the more subjective criteria.Fusion and Parallels Desktop both normally cost $80, but pricing for both is a moving target. VMware’s appliance library is huge, with over 1,900 appliances available Parallels Desktop’ library, on the other hand, contains only 98. Installation and general operationInstalling Fusion 4 is surprisingly simple: You just drag and drop the program to any directory you wish. So if you want to run your virtualization program on more than one Mac, Fusion will cost less—potentially much less.Advantage: Fusion (for the moment). Parallels Desktop, on the other hand, requires one license per machine, and it uses activation to check those serial numbers. Fusion’s license (for non-business users) allows you to install and use it on any Macs that you own or control. No matter how much you pay for a virtualization program, remember that you’ll also need to factor in the price of Windows itself.There’s a big hidden cost in those prices: the software license. In fact, when you quit Fusion, unless you choose to leave the Windows applications menu item in your Mac’s menu bar, absolutely nothing Fusion-related is left running. Instead, they remain within the Fusion application bundle and automatically activate on subsequent launches.More importantly, they’re deactivated when you quit Fusion. But those extensions aren’t hidden away in some low-level system folder where you’ll never find them. When you first launch Fusion, it asks for your administrative password and activates its extensions. ![]() Its settings window mimics that of System Preferences, while Parallels uses a tabs-and-lists layout. Fusion offers a similar program, but you have to opt in, not out.Fusion (left) and Parallels (right) take slightly different approaches to their preferences windows.When it comes to changing the settings for a virtual machine, the two programs take a slightly different approach: Parallels Desktop uses a floating window that’s independent of the virtual machine being configured that makes it easy to toggle between the settings and the virtual machine, but it’s also easy to lose track of the settings window if you click another window to the foreground.Fusion, by contrast, dims the virtual machine, and presents a fixed window in the center of the screen, on top of the virtual machine. One thing I don’t like about Parallels is that it automatically enrolls you in the company’s Customer Experience Program, which collects anonymous usage data you have to opt out by disabling it in the Advanced section of Preferences. This means, among other things, that if you use a window-management utility, it may not work correctly.Fusion (left) and Parallels (right) treat Windows apps’ windows differently when running in their respective integrated modes.Fusion, on the other hand, treats each Windows app like a window from any OS X application: The system treats them as truly separate from one another. You can see this if you activate Mission Control in OS X Lion: Regardless of how many Windows applications you’re running, they’ll all be lumped together in one Parallels Desktop entry. But there is a subtle but telling difference: Parallels Desktop actually treats the windows of your Windows apps as one, even though they display separately. (VMware calls this mode Unity Parallels calls it Coherence.)In this mode, both programs seem to treat these windows as though they’re regular Mac apps. Windowed windowsBoth programs can be run in an “integration” mode, meaning Windows applications aren’t bound inside a single Windows window rather, they appear side-by-side in the OS X graphical user interface with Mac programs. Keyboard shortcuts for mac word insert photoFusion has a slower update cycle. Parallels Desktop pushes out updates rapidly, so users get the latest features and fixes as quickly as possible. The two companies handle updates differently, however. And in that case it makes more sense to treat the windows the way Fusion does.Programs of this complexity require frequent updates there’s just so much going on that there’s always going to be another feature to add or another bug to fix. But if you’re going to the trouble of using an integrated mode, chances are you want your Windows apps to behave just like your Mac ones.
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