Virtual machine software questions

[willemjacobusse]

I have been experimenting and installed windows 98 in a Parallels virtual machine on an Apple Mac Mini. It's working just fine.
I tried to do a similiar thing on a brand new PC, installing win98 in a virtual machine under Virtual Box (recently acquired by Sun) The motherboard in this machine is an ASrock Wolfdale and doesnt come with win98 drivers.
So win98 fails to install due to lack of drivers.
This raises some interesting questions:

Is the way Parallels and Virtual Box function fundamentally different? Does parallels maybe do a better job of virtualizing the hardware?
Or is the real difference in the hardware and can the lack of win98 drivers not be overcome?

[GroundZero3]

Most virtualization software do not mimic the hardware, an example is VM images don't fully realize the hardware they are running on. The host knows about the hardware, the image running on virtualized generic hardware. Hence why you can move a VM image from one vmware server to another without windows freaking out about changed hardware. I cant comment on parallel or Virtual box, but i would bet they work the same way.

[ShyguyXPC]

well as to the motherboard, chances are if its newer, there are no Win98 drivers, as most are made for Windows 2000/XP or Vista now days with little to no Win95/98/ME support.

although some virtual software emulates a generic set of hardware many times (as GZ kind of pointed out above), Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 for example, installs a generic video driver, with only up to a very minimal amount of memory for the "card" (virtual PC 2004 only allowed up to I think 8MB for video ), making it utterly useless for many games, only making VPC2007 useful for testing actual user apps, or websurfing, etc etc...

I think the same thing happens for VMwares products, but I'm pretty sure the hardware virtualized/emulated is a better selection. I've tried several Appliances in their VM Player program, Linux distro's, game servers, etc... haven't tried much else though.

haven't dealt with Parallels or Virtual Box yet though.