Trying desperately to try out the Windows Phone 8 emulator… I am running a mid 2009 MacBook Pro with a 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. The WP8 emulator requires Hyper-V on Windows 8 and Hyper-V requires that the processor supports virtualization through Second Level Address Translation (SLAT). Intel Core i5 &, i7 should support it so a newer MacBook Pro might work, but for me that makes it impossible to run the WP8 emulator on my MacBook Pro.
Luckily I have a Windows 7 Sony Vaio lying around, that the kids use, which has an Intel Core i3 which apparently supports SLAT! So I’ve installed Windows 8 as a dual boot from VHD on the Windows 7 machine using Scott Hanselmans excellent guide (which works for Win 8 Pro). This will at least let me try out Windows Phone 8 development before I either purchase a physical device or upgrade my work computer.
I still haven’t given up on getting the Windows Phone 7 emulator running in Parallels 8 but for now it looks like I have to give up on trying to get the WP8 emulator running on my MacBook Pro. At least I can still develop on Windows 8 for Windows Phone 8 using Parallels 8 – I just can’t run or debug anything on an emulated device.
I have a MacBook Pro Retina and have the exact same problem. Just have to wait for Parallels to fix this in some way.
Parallels won’t be able to get the Windows Phone 8 emulator working. Microsoft have made sure it will only work if you are running Windows 8 on the metal unvirtualized with a processor that supports SLAT. Parallels may be able to allow the Windows Phone 7 emulator to work however. I have messed up my current Windows Phone 7 Parallels environment while trying to work around certain DirectX issues so I have to reinstall before I can test… Now that Parallels 8 supports DirectX 10 and Windows 8 there is a possibility that the WP7 emulator will work, at least with low performance.
Not true. VMWare can emulate SLAT and you can thus run the emulator in a VMware VM. Presumably the metal needs slat support
Parallels confirmed to me that Parallels 8 does not support SLAT in the guest os