Hi so i know that you can flash a fake BIOS on a GPU but could you make a virtual BIOS and say you have older or weaker hardware?

[3Dimentinal]

So I understand that its almost impossible and there really is no reason to do it, but i know that you can flash a fake BIOS on a GPU. Could you make a virtual BIOS and say you have older or weaker hardware?

Im looking to make a virtual desktop on a pretty beefy computer that could emulate hardware to make program's believe that you have specific hardware.

I know that the programs will crash but I would still like to try so if we can back step on all the shutdowns.

[TheBean]

do the same thing fake gpu scams do but instead of making drivers think its a newer one, make it an old one. 

 

I am not responsible for any legal reprecussions this may cause. this is theoretical, I have never tried this, i dont know how to do this. i am also not responsible for any damage caused by this. 

[3Dimentinal]

Thank you so much for commenting i understand that would work but only for the GPU. I am looking at running some programs that require more being changed then just the GPU. If I also just went the other way and made a newer GPU seem older i would have to turn it back just to run normal programs. I am more looking for a virtual machine where i can have my fake hardware BIOS and then my normal BIOS for normal computing. 

[mariushm]

You can use virtual machines, like VirtualBox for example ... you can specify the number of cores, memory, frequency etc etc.

 

[Franck]

I is doable but it's a lot of work. Some components such as audio card you can't do it through bios flash. You need custom drivers. The amount of work you will put in every single component surpass the cost of buying the component to test it.

 

In multiplatform dev it has been tried and done often and can take easily couple dozen of hours for a simple audio driver. Plus that is assuming you have the actual implementation of the original component. Even at a low driver dev wage that's at least 500-600$ worth of developpement for a single component which might actually cost you 40$ to buy new (20$ used) and then with virtualisation you can simply make passthrough and have the machine you want.

 

As @mariushm mentioned Virutal Box can change the generic values for CPU and RAM but still this won't change the CPU from being model X to model Y. Exactly like when you have for example small server with lets say 4 x Xeon Gold 48 cores for 192 cores. You can make 24 VM with 8 cores but the CPU model still display Xeon Gold.

 

All that being said there is services  that used to exist that can test few hardware combinaison but those are fixed. We used to deal with a local company that had a couple hundred prebuilt system and there were pushing our software on all computer and run the preset tests for error and we could pay more to get one of our QA guy to get on site and with the KVM connect to each and manually test each computer with the software and how it behave. I am pretty sure there must be actual online services nowaday that does that. That was a kind of service i used about 15 years ago so that why i guess it might have evolved. Nowaday my solution is to keep replacing the company computer with different components so i have a huge base of different systems and use case scenario.

[3Dimentinal]

thanks a bunch