MojoPac Mobile Gaming Platform & More

A Familiar Face
Once started, you'll find yourself immersed in a clean Windows environment. That's right, a brand spanking new Windows install without the need for any drivers or even installing Windows, but rather sharing the necessary components with those from the host machine running Windows XP. Already this is a far cry better for end users compared to booting off a Virtual Machine installation that requires its own copy of Windows a portable drive that has Windows and way too many drivers for every machine encountered on the road.

Inside, you'll find Windows to be exactly how you remember it, with a few tweaks to simplify configuration. There's your own desktop icons, start menu (classic or modern), Internet Explorer, My Documents folder, and of course, your background wallpaper. On the top of the screen is the MojoBar, a way to quickly switch between the guest and host without rebooting.

Cross-Mojulation
MojoPac does a fairly good job sharing resources between the host machine and the guest session. While accessing documents on the host's local hard drives is not currently possible, all DVD and CD drives, including those emulated by Daemon Tools are accessible from within MojoPac, as are external USB devices (iPods, cameras, flash drives). For those looking to populate MojoPac with files from the host PC, it's possible to quickly switch to the host and drag files to the portable drive, then switch back to MojoPac. Unfortunately, that's about the only manual way files may be shared besides CDs and removable media, as browsing networked computers is not an option. However, a wizard for data copying is available prior to launching MojoPac, able to perform a one-way sync of Internet Explorer and Firefox settings as well as individual files and folders from the host.

Other resources, such as printers, extra monitors, tablets, joysticks, and audio devices such as on-board and USB sound cards and microphones are also brought over, although they may not be available until after a reboot of MojoPac. Fake printers, such as PDF writers are also brought over from the host, and once printed to within MojoPac, a small balloon will pop up indicating that a window has appeared on the host PC. Switch over, and low and behold it's there, asking where you'd like to save the PDF. Groovy baby!

Thankfully, when MojoPac is sharing resources, it knows how to play nicely with the host. Both the host and guest may be online at the same time, both may control the audio at the same time (think iTunes on the host and a game on the guest), and programs running in one session will continue to run in the background while the other is loaded. Because the two have their own separate registries and shells, programs of the same name may be running on both at the same time even, such as two instances of Trillian or Photoshop.

Patience is a Virtue
Because there are more flash drives and iPods out there than portable hard drives, I figured it'd be more suitable to do the majority of my testing on an iPod nano 2G, namely the 8GB one I just reviewed with read and write speeds of 25Mbps and 34Mbps respectively. Of course, speeds obtained will obviously differ tremendously depending on the type of external storage you plan to install MojoPac on, but one thing is clear, BUY AS FAST OF A DRIVE AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN! If you're looking to use MojoPac frequently, I'd recommend a cheap 5400RPM USB 2.0 external 2.5" hard drive. A decent-sized 40GB drive can be found for about $70 online these days.

While not necessarily a limitation of MojoPac, practically everything I did within it on the new iPod nano was dramatically slower than on a regular Windows PC. This is in part due to the fact that all temp files, registry editing, etc is being done on the drive itself. Installing a game like Unreal Tournament 2004 took around 50 minutes, and installing typical applications such as iTunes, Photoshop and Dreamweaver were also particularly slow. Oddly enough, during these intensive installations, I would find that Explorer and Firefox were more sluggish than usual on the host PC, and that iTunes would go into skipping frenzies every now and then.

For gamers, you'll find yourself behind a few kills once entering a round due to the delay in loading the map, and will quite possibly encounter some spikes during the first few bits of the round as additional characters, etc are loaded into memory. Don't worry though, frames per second aren't affected much at all from what I could tell by keeping an eye on FRAPS while playing Quake IV and UT2004. As far as Photoshop users are concerned, you already know the drill when it comes to your cache files being on a sluggish drive.

However, not all is lost. Speed may be increased a little by following the steps outlined on MojoPac's website and readme files as far as optimizing the drive for speed instead of safe storage within Windows. Also, thankfully MojoPac implemented paging between memory and the hard drive to take place on the host PC instead of on the portable drive. While speed is still a tremendous tradeoff of using MojoPac on a flash device, remember that for many of the programs that media professionals and gamers use, it's the only clean way so far to take them between computers.

So What Doesn't Work?
Because the majority of what I tried to install and run on MojoPac is running nice and peachy, I figured it'd be better to dedicate a section to what doesn't work instead of what does work. As you might expect, MojoPac isn't the holy grail of software, so don't go expecting it to be able to do everything that standard Windows can. Again, currently it?s the best non-VM way to use a majority of the applications that Ceedo and U3 won't even touch, but there are a few things that require workarounds or simply don't work at all. So far, it seems that a majority of these issues are low-level or driver related.

For one, webcam users will find themselves unable to install their drivers and capture software on MojoPac and take their portable drive and camera to any host machine expecting it to work. Likewise, one can not install to the host and expect the drivers and software to automatically propagate to MojoPac, because that kind of patchwork would probably be insane. Rather, it's necessary to install the software and drivers on both the host machine and MojoPac for it to work. PDF writers, such as Acrobat and PDFCreator will also not work, as the printer never seems to appear in the Printers and Faxes window.

Second, low-level file system support software doesn't work, such as MacDrive for reading Mac-formatted partitions. Because MojoPac is only able to read external drives, installing this kind of the software on both the host and MojoPac would seem pointless since the portable drive would most likely travel with the user and not stay with the host PC.

Third, all of my favorite shortcut keys in Windows are missing, either simply not working or popping up in the host environment and not MojoPac. This includes Win+D (show desktop), Win+E (launch explorer), Win+F (find), Win+R (run), Win+F (find files), and so on. Ctrl-Alt-Del will launch as part of the host but open the task manager in the guest environment, and Win+L will lock the entire computer using the host machine's password.

Fourth, MojoPac does NOT totally isolate the host PC from the guest programs. For example, I attempted to use WindowBlinds, a shareware theming utility within MojoPac. All seemed fine, until I switched back to the host environment and saw that my windows were changed in color. If this can happen, I lay serious doubt as to how well the host PC would be protected against malware installations.

Fifth, MojoPac is a single user experience. Despite what the logoff menu will show you, there is no multiple user switching, let alone multiple users. In fact, if you'll open the control panel, you'll notice a distinct lack of the Users control panel among others. Changing the password is now done by clicking the Settings button in the MojoBar.

For advanced users, the Administrative Tools folder is also absent, however they can all be opened manually using the MMC. However, some snap-ins such as Disk Management don't work, and others such as Local Users and Groups are left totally unpopulated. This should not pose any problems that I can foresee, however it's still fun to note.

Additionally, there is a distinct possibility that corporate software that requires activation and performs hardware checks to thwart piracy (Office, Adobe Suite) will have issues when using multiple computers, unless they're Volume License or Academic versions. MojoPac intends to fix this in the 1.1 release, although a timeframe for that is not given. Also, while I personally have not been able to confirm this, there have been some cases reported by bloggers that MojoPac will not install on flash drives that don't report a serial number to Windows. These drives must be in the minority, as I've been able to install it on drives from PNY, Geek Squad, Lexar, Sandisk, Apple, and Western Digital without problems. Just to be safe however, MojoPac has a 30-day trial, so I suggest you download it and try it before purchasing just to make sure you don't encounter any nasty surprises.

Finally, while not necessarily something that's not working, it's still a matter of importance that should be considered. Unlike U3 devices which can optionally require a password to mount the data partition, MojoPac's password is used only for starting up the environment. Anyone with a computer that happens to stumble across your drive lying on the sidewalk can still plug it into their own computer and copy whatever files they please from the drive. So do be cautious of what personal data you put on the drive, if you're not going to use some form of encryption software.

Who Is MojoPac Really For?
Currently, the uses for MojoPac are extremely limited, as perhaps the largest restriction implemented by MojoPac is that the host computer must be logged in with Administrator rights. That means that most school, library, workplace and PC cafe computers (assuming their IT departments aren't staffed by idiots) are out of the question, as they will most likely be logged in as standard users. According to MojoPac's website, "Limited Mode" support will be introduced in MojoPac 2.0, although there is no given timeline for when that will be released. Additionally, their website states it has a solution for parents, universities, and libraries that want to allow MojoPac without opening their computers to a can of worms. Conveniently, this solution is not made public, putting an additional strain on those IT workers that are already tied up with other projects and possibly suspicious of this new Mojo-whatch-ya-ma-call-it that has no proven track record yet.

So then, because MojoPac exists as a way to keep your software separate from whatever computer you're using, yet you need admin rights to use it in the first place, that brings us to our good old friend, the honor system. As an enthusiast gamer and sysadmin, I've spent too much time already cleaning up other systems and generally prefer to lock my computer tight, allowing no one to use my PC. (I just redirect them to my Mac). However, there are times when a friend comes over looking to show off the latest PC game that I'm not sure I want installed on my PC (and it would probably violate the EULA to install on both his computer and mine anyway). For such an instance, MojoPac would be perfect. Just think, Joe Sixpack can come over and show me his leet skills in Day of Defeat without me ever having to install Steam on my machine!

Students looking to finish a group project with some odd piece of software can take their MojoPac drive to a friend's house and work on it there, where ideas may flow more freely than over an instant messenger. Parents, who would prefer their PC stay nice and clean, free of unnecessary software can give their kids MojoPac enabled flash drives that would act as their own personal computing environment, complete with their own personal cursors and programs. Professionals so long as whatever computers they plan to use have administrator access, can use MojoPac as a substitute for a laptop during times of light travel.

Outside of those scenarios, until MojoPac has working "limited mode" support on any PC, it will probably not fare as well as other portable application platforms in the mainstream market. And honestly, I'd be happier lugging along my laptop for most purposes anyway since it's faster, it's a whole computer that I control, and I don't have to worry about admin rights. But I'm sure early adopters will love to play with it.