I plan on buying both Fallout and Fallout 2 (Fallout 3 is pre-ordered for the XBox 360) to play on my iMac (see images for specs). Has anyone tried playing either of these on a Mac? Would I need to run them under BootCamp or would they run OK in a VM (XP Pro with 512MB RAM allocated under the VM/the full 2GB under BootCamp)?
Any ideas/thoughts/suggestions welcome.
TIA,

VMware Fusion 2.0 supports DirectX 9 now so it shouldn't have any problems running it.
VMs > Boot Camp any day :)

Well, I got Fallout it works in a VM but, it's kind of a pain. :(
The framerate is all over the place (FRAPS reports anywhere from 1FPS to 150FPS) and I had to change the settings of my mouse so that I could actually see/use it (I had to slow it down). Another issue is the screen resolution. I have my VM set at 1280x720 and it goes up to 1680x1050 when I go full-screen but, the game only wants to run at 640x480... not cool. :(
I'll try it again tomorrow via BootCamp. Judging by how it worked in the VM, I'm guessing it will run great though. :)

I'm downloading Fallout now. I'm first going to try running it under Wine (Darwine for Mac OS) -- surely this game is not that intensive, right? It's 10 years old. :)
If that's a no go, I see where VirtualBox (VM) takes me.
And, I had heard that GOG is packaging some of these games with DOSbox in order to make them run on XP... there's DOSbox for Mac, and if they would separate the executable from the package, we'd be able to run it more-or-less natively...
Anyway, yeah, I think with these old games there will likely be opportunities to run them on Mac a few different ways, and hopefully as they spin up, GOG will be interested in assisting or hearing how we're doing.

You're kidding right? Snooty remarks follow....
Welcome to "Classic" gaming on the PC. Back in the day, games were made with these things called "sprites". They don't really scale like 3d models do. I guess you could think of Sprites as sheets of paper with drawing on them. Because Sprites can't scale, or get bigger without changing the drawing, Setting the game to any damn resolution you choose isn't really an option.
The nice thing about the old days is we used computer monitors that were based on the antiquated, (but, IMO superior in some respects) "Cathode Ray Tube" or CRT for short. The advantage to these screens over the newer "Liquid Crystal Display" of today (LCD), is the pixels on the screen could be drawn larger or smaller depending on the demands of the system ensuring that any system could display their images at full screen no matter the resolution. So running a game at 640x480 looked just fine on a monitor that supported higher resolutions like the highly sought after 1024x768.
The game may not be that revolutionary technically, but there is a reason it's on this site and heralded as one of the best turn based strategy games of its time.
In most cases the game should run emulated/Virtual so long as the DirectX support is there (BootCamp for sure, Parallels and VMWare should be fine now as well), I seem to recall having a LOT of crash issues with the original version of Fallout 1 on modern computers. It'll be interesting to see how this version runs since Gog.com is claiming that the game is guaranteed to work.

Running it under DOSBox was the first thing I tried but, I just got an error message (see the attached image). :(
I don't know if it's because the game itself requires some version of Windows or, if that's just a requirement of the installer though...

I wasn't kidding actually but, thanks for the detailed explanation. :)
What I'm wondering about now is Fallout 2. I see on Amazon that there was a Mac version available but, they don't list the system requirements so I don't know if it requires Classic (unfortunately, unavailable on Intel Macs) support or not.

Well, I tried with Darwine and it installed OK but, whenever I tried to run it, I got error messages (check the attached images).
I might try VirtualBox later but, i don't want to go through the hassle of installing Windows again. I skipped Parallels and bought VMWare instead so I don't plan on buying it just to try the game... Maybe someone else has it and can let us know how/if it works.

Yeah, so far that's a no-go on DOSbox (not gonna work since they've made it a Windwos application) and also for Darwine (not sure what's the specific issue, but the installer works and the program won't launch).
So, it's time to try a full-on virtualization (Virtualbox/Fusion/Parallels/etc)

I have had excellent success running this under VMWare Fusion 2.0 on my Mac. Framerate was smooth, graphics were crisp, though small, sound was excellent and smooth.
If you have VMWare Fusion 1.x, version 2.0 is a free upgrade, so there's no reason not to.

What kind of hardware are you running it on (via VMWare)? I upgraded to 2.0 before I tried running the game... What settings (RAM/number of processors) are you using for the VM? Is the VM running XP or Vista?
TIA,

That explains a lot. I'm running it on a 2.0GHz Core Duo 20" iMac (early 2006) with a 2GB RAM/128MB X1600 off a BootCamp partition (32GB). :(
I guess it's time to think about upgrading to a newer model...

You could always, just ... you know... BOOT from the Boot Camp partition :P. It makes it a bit more of a hassle, but the performance should be night and day.
To be fair though, my virtual machine settings are as follows:
Sharing: Disabled
1CPU, 512 MB ram
3D Enabled
Battery: Disabled
Printers: Enabled
Network: NAT
Hard Disks: Boot Camp
CD: Auto
Sound: Connected
Changing those settings might make a difference. I also have, under VMWare Preferences, the performance setting set to "Optimize for virtual machine disk performace", which might also make a difference.

Hmm, same settings here and it didn't work.
Using an 2.8ghz iMac with 2GB of ram.
Only running Windows XP SP2 though.
I'm not sure about the video settings within Windows though. Is it just using VMWare or can ATI drivers be obtained?