VMGuide

A handy utility to manage your virtual machines, provides an easy access to hardware configuration and BIOS settings that are commonly hidden in the UI.

Useful when installing pre-release or vintage software.

Supported Virtualizer

• VMware Workstation/Player
• Microsoft Virtual PC 2004/2007
• Windows Virtual PC (for Windows 7)
• Virtualbox

Features

• Adjust the BIOS date of your virtual machine and disable time sync.
• Turn off ACPI support, handy when installing OSes that have issuses with ACPI.
• Specify the hardware your VM virtualizes, like Sound Card and Network Adapter (VMware only).
• Search all your virtual machines and manage in one UI.
• Command line and scriptting support (VMGuide.CUI).
• WPF-based GUI, and System-Aware DPI Scaling support.

Command Line

Type "help" in the prompt to get a detailed help.

You can also use commands as a parameter. Use semicomons to sperate commands, and add quotation marks if needed.

Example:

C:\>VMGuide.CUI.exe "select file=\"D:\Virtual Machines\Windows XP.vmx\";set biosdate=20010625"

Which equals to:

C:\>VMGuide.CUI.exe
VMGuide>select file="D:\Virtual Machines\Windows XP.vmx"
VMGuide>set biosdate=20010625

Scripting

You can create a UTF-8 text file with commands as a script, then specify the script file in the shell command line.

Example:

C:\>VMGuide.CUI.exe whistler.txt

whistler.txt:

select file="D:\Virtual Machines\Windows XP.vmx"
set biosdate=20010625
set sound=es1371

URL Protocol

The URL protocol vm-settings is supported, which provides an user-friendly way to integrate VMGuide GUI to your project.

You may need to manually register this protocol, a batch file (Tools\register.bat) is provided to do so.

Example:

vm-settings://biosdate/20050721
vm-settings://datelock/false (The value "true" is meaningless, set the bios date and it will disable time sync.)
vm-settings://acpi/false

UWP Bridge for Desktop (Project Centennial) Ready

This program is tested to work as a Centennial UWP, use the assets and manifest provided to create your own .appx package.

The vm-settings URL Protocol is also supported when running as a Centennial UWP.