DirectX in virtual machines

[ic1male]

They say you can do anything with software. I am ignorant to why no-one seems to have implemented DirectX inside a virtual machine yet - whether it be Parallels, VMware or MS Virtual PC.

Can anyone explain the difficulty? Ta.

 

[BillytheImpaler]

The guts of Direct3D are closed and proprietary. To implement this without access to the source means you have to reverse engineer it. It's very hard to do and as such no one has done it with 100% success yet. In addition to that D3D is a continually moving target. When cleanroom reverse engineers get close to implementing, say, D3D8, D3D9 will come out and make most of their work obsolete.

 

[Memphis]

I could be way off the mark here, but my understanding of DirectX is that it allows software (games, etc) to interface directly with hardware. Emulation kinda defeats the purpose of DirectX.