Parallels 7 and Games can get along!

My wife got a new iMac, the 2011 model with the i7 processor. She uses it for her illustration work and for playing games on occasion (mostly with me).

She decided to go a new route with this new computer and get Parallels so she can be playing a game and illustrating at the same time. I was skeptical that it would work and wanted to stick with good old Bootcamp but she liked the idea of switching back and forth during turned based games like Heroes of Might and Magic.

I googled and googled and googled and never found any definite info on if Parallels actually runs games or not. All I found were either vague assurances it will work (Something like "Get it, it runs faster than the old version") or screenshots (you can take a screenshot even if the game is running at 2 fps).

Finally I guessed the lack of information means people must have some degree of success or they'd be online whining about it not working. (It's sad how we report things that make us mad much more than things that work great).

Parallels Installation

We bought Parralels at the local college bookstore. It came on a USB drive with the setup program on it. When we ran the setup program it asked us if we wanted to download the latest version, which we did. It then installed fine without issue.

Windows Installation

This part had me worried. We had the Windows 7 Family Pack upgrade which meant we couldn't install it from scratch. We did try, but it said it needed a previously installed version of Windows. So we dug out an old Windows XP 64 bit disk that we had gotten free when we bought a copy of XP a while back. It installed fine surprisingly! Then we had to set Parralels to boot off the DVD drive instead of the hard drive and ran Windows 7 setup. It upgraded and activated without a problem.

Need to install toolkit through the Parallels menu after windows 7 is running.

Once we got Windows 7 running and updated it was time to install some programs. I started with basic utilities like WinRAR, Direct X, Foxit... and gosh they installed fast! I didn't even see the installer copying files I just clicked "next" and it said it was done! So far so good...

Running Games

Then I decided to try TrackMania Nations Forever first. It didn't have a single issue installing. I did the benchmark and it ran on almost max settings... except something would make it suddenly drop to 2 fps. With a little testing I found it was the shader quality setting. Any shader quality above 1 would kill the framerate, otherwise the game ran 60 fps at 2560x1440 with max settings!

Then I tried Heroes of Might and Magic 5 and Civilization 4 with the Tomas' War mod. They both ran perfectly at max settings, and we didn't have any issue playing them over a LAN.

Finally, we tried Sins of a Solar Empire... with poor results, but it could be my fault. I was running v1.05 with the 7 Deadly Sins mod v2.1. Both the game and the mod are old unfinished versions.

The main problem was that it crashed frequently and without warning. That makes any game basically unplayable. The next issue was the right click to rotate camera feature was so sensitive the camera would jump about 90 degrees with a slight movement of the mouse. The third issue was many of the textures would flash black as the game ran and sometimes the whole screen would flash. The game still had a great framerate at max graphics settings when it did run. I didn't get to test it with lots of objects onscreen though.

I tried contacting Stardock about the issues and got a frank reply: "There is nothing we can do about this, it is out of our scope." Apparently they weren't very interested in working with someone who is running the game on a iMac.

I did have issues with some of the installers, like Sins and Civ 4 went terribly slow

Some installer's backgrounds would cover up the windows and I'd have to alt-tab to see the window with the next button.


Hope this information was helpful to someone!