I assume what is keeping people from gaming inside virtual machines is graphics performance. In Olden Days there was a company that made "universal" accelerated graphics drivers for OS/2....

Ah, yes. Kendall Bennett's SciTech Display Doctor.

http://www.theinquir...ideo-driver-blues

The technology was bought by a company called Alt Richmond which seems to be going after graphics for "portable devices". http://www.altrichmond.ca/gav.html It's hard to tell if it's anything more than a patent bank at the moment, though.

It's an old problem. Unless the manufacturer of the hardware supplies good drivers, most people and most system vendors aren't going to be interested. 3rd party drivers almost always take longer to deliver, are slower to be updated, and riskier (will it work or not? will it be fast enough?). Similarly for solutions involving Wine.

One keeps hoping for a graphics "standard" that's fast enough, stable, open and inexpensive and/or free. But the market changes too quickly, and there's too much money to be made in keeping things proprietary (see ATI vs nVidia). DirectX zz, kernel changes, X changes, Quartz, etc., etc.

If VMs with arbitrary OSes could push the hardware as hard as "native", then issues in porting games would go away. Or if someone would make a "good enough" console VM, that might be a decent solution to gaming on Linux and Mac - consoles don't change quickly.

"I'm playing 12 simultaneous PS3 games on my Magny-Cours Hackintosh!"

Someone needs to come up with a breakthrough product that makes people want to provide the best possible support for it. I'm not holding my breath, but eventually the hardware may be fast enough that it won't matter. Presumably above ~ 100 fps the eye doesn't care even if the display device can keep up.

A me-too gaming box on MacOS and Linux probably isn't going to do it when the console and Windows markets are so big. Presumably Valve is doing the port to keep its options open in case Steve's new boxes really take off. And, as static Jay said, if you're doing a Mac port then a Linux port might not be that much more work. A universal system (run Windows, Linux, Mac, console games, and have a DVR all in the same box) might be a compelling solution but it's a long and difficult slog (not to mention the various license issues that would have to be solved and Apple and MS probably see little advantage in permitting such a thing).

All of this is yet another argument against software patents and for reasonable copyright terms. These problems wouldn't be so daunting if software copyrights expired after 20 years or so, rather than 95 - http://www.copyright.../publicdomain.cfm ... Yeah, like that'll happen anytime soon. :-(

Cheers,
Scott.
(Who imagines that a great way to lose millions would be to try to develop a fast virtual PS3 or XBox for Linux, and who isn't a gamer anyway...)