[TrunkCom] scanner software and the Mac?

[Steve Matzura]

But that's not at all what he asked.

On Wed, 5 Feb 2014 01:26:04 -0500, you wrote:

>On Tue, Feb 04, 2014 at 11:11:03PM -0500, Jeff Kenyon wrote:
>
>> Hi everyone, I was just curious if all of the scanner software to date
>> including what is provided with the latest units will work with the Mac
>> and if so what are people's impressions?
>
>	This is a bit ambiguous...
>
>	All recent Intel based Macs can run Windows programs under
>Bootcamp or some kind of VM (VMware, Parallels and various others).
>
>	Support exists for XP, Vista, Win7 and Win8 on relatively modern
>Intel Macs, really moldy MS OSes before XP SP3 are not particularly
>supported and because of BIOS and hardware differences may not run
>without some rather skilled and serious effort.
>
>	In general almost all common Windows programs will work in this
>mode just as on any other Intel PC.  Performance in Bootcamp (native
>Windows on the bare hardware) can be very good depending on the Mac,
>some are very fast compared to typical Windows machines, others not so
>much.
>
>	Performance on the virtual machines (VMWare, Parallels etc) is
>usually a bit slow compared to running on the bare hardware, but with
>tuning and modern multicore processors can be pretty respectable.
>But running on a virtual machine allows mixing of Mac programs and
>environment and the Windows one... rather than booting one or the other.
>And Mac programs can typically access Windows files and visa versa.
>
>	Macs do not have native serial ports so Windows scanner programs
>that depend on PCI bus or motherboard serial ports (COMx) may or may not
>work when used with USB based serial port adapters.   It is possible to
>do normal serial type stuff with USB serial adapters on a Mac
>(particularly FDTI chip based ones for which MacOS drivers are
>available) but some scanner hobby programs are deeply dependent on low
>level access to serial ports for timing and parsing data and this cannot
>work with USB serial ports on any Windows compatible hardware Mac or non
>Mac.
>
>	AFAIK there aren't many (well very few) scanner oriented
>programs natively available for MacOS X... this is because nobody has
>written them, not because it is impossible to create them for a Mac
>(which is BSD Unix more or less under the hood).  There are some
>interesting ham radio native MacOS applications around... and porting
>apps from Linux to MacOS is not impossible depending on how Macish the
>UI has to be..