APD Communicator under VMware Fusion on a Mac: works like a dream!

Tino de Rijk

Last December I treated myself on a brand-new Apple MacBook portable, mainly out of curiosity after 30 years of Windows usage. Must say: I like it, although I still like Windows as well. Both work well if treated well.
Anyway: no matter how much you like the Mac, from time to time you still need some good old Windows programs running on it - like the APD Communicator and LogViewer software.
So I had the choice to go for either the Parallels virtual machine (VM) software product, or wait for the competing new VMware Fusion VM product. Because I have very good experience with VMware products on other O.S. platforms, I decided to wait for the latter, and bought it last week, right after its formal release of Version 1.0.
I did the following, pretty straight forward things to get the show on the road:

1. Downloaded and installed the Vmware Fusion package under MacOS 10.4;
2. Installed Windows XP SP2 Professional SP2 in the Fusion VM, and spent a whole evening downloading the required Microsoft patches (sic..);
3. Installed the free AVG antivirus package and Microsoft's Defender anti-spyware (also free) to avoid hackers spoiling my little plot;
4. Downloaded the latest drivers for the USB-to-serial adapter that comes as standard with the Inspo/Evo;
5. Installed those drivers, and made the recommended changes as documented separately by APD in a leaflet: set serial port speed to 57600, disable FIFO buffers, and set APD Communicator to run in Windows95 compatibility mode;
6. Plugged in the USB-to-serial adapter, fired up the APD Communicator SW, pointed it to the correct serial port (COM3 in my case), and hooked up the Inspo;
7. Worked without a hitch, and fast! Perfect!! Works on both mine and my wife's Turtles.

So, for the Apple users amongst you: Vmware Fusion is yet another option you have for running Windows (programs) under MacOS, and the peripheral support of it (USB, network (wired & wireless), DVD) is flawless.
And it's damned fast too.

So now I have the best of both worlds (Windows XP next to MacOS 10), running side by side, and running on what unarguably must be the best looking PC hardware in the world.

Highly recommended! As to costs: Vmware Fusion costs USD 79.-- / EUR 79.--. Obviously you need a copy of Windows too. And no, I don't have Vmware shares or ties....

Ciao,
Tino.

caveseeker7

Cool Tino, thanks.

__________________
Cheers
Stefan



"Political Correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority,
and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media,
which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.!"

mysiar

Tino
how about VMWare perofrmance on your laptop ?
I have Pentium 4 2.8 GHz with 1 GB of RAM and running w2k or xp on vmware is not that sweet.

Regards
Piotr

Tino de Rijk

Very hard to objectively quantify....
WinXP starts up in 60 seconds (incl. network-readyness and loaded antivirus/spyware software), which is around the same as on my "normal" Windows machine (Dell P4 1.7 GHz, 512 MB, fast 7200 RPM disk).
all in all it feels quite fast, with applications loading quite fast also (e.g. MS Office 2003).
I gave the VM only 384 MB, as my whole MacBook only has 1 GB, so I guess that a Mac with more memory and subsequently a VM with more memory, say 512 MB or so, would be even faster, reducing the page-swap-rate.
I also have Fusion still set to only use one of the two Core 2 Duo processors in the Mac, but is is capable of using both. As it is fast enough for me as it is, and as I don't plan to use it structurally anyway, I didn't play with other settings as yet (I only have it two days...).

But all in all in makes a pretty fast impression on me. Fusion has been built from the ground up, and uses a.o. the virtualisation capabilities of the latest generation of Intel chip (silicon-based virtualisation).

Ciao,

Tino.

SteveJ

I've just moved over to a Mac after frustration with Windows +++. Any advice on deco software that runs on Mac? Don't really want to run Windows on the Mac....

Patto_chan

There is a Mac OS X version of DDPLAN (download link). Buhlmann. Useful for generating bailout tables etc. It's free.

There is also a Mac version of Nautilus Dive planner but I have only tried the demo.

Patto_chan

As I mentioned in a separate post recently I opted for Parallels and it works very well with APD Communicator.

Costs appear similar for both VM Fusion and Parallels and an XP license is required

I must say that XP annoys me with its constant authenticity validation. I bought one XP OEM license and installed it under Parallels. Within Parallels, I made a clone of that Virtual machine to keep as a safe backup and continued using the original virtual machine - all on the same Mac hardware. Later when I booted up the clone I was told the license key was already in use and that copy was no longer valid. So I had to delete my safe backup clone and just use the first virtual machine. I know they were 2 different virtual machines but it was all working under Parallels on the same Mac hardware so I thought it was overkill and unnecessarily restrictive. As a humble Mac user I am not used to the M$ Big Brother approach. Rant off.

Tino de Rijk

I don't want to defend MS perse, but there was a whole thread about it on the VMware Fusion bulletin board. If you would have phoned MS, they would in all likelihood have re-activated your 2nd copy, FOC.
A clone many times has a different HW profile, e.g. for the TCP/IP or (virtual) MAC adress. This is done so you can run them side-by-side.
Just my 2 pennies.....

My main reason for running something like Parallels or Fusion is exactly to avoid what the previous poster wanted: having to look for software in a Mac version, while there is already a good version in a Windows "jacket" available. Especially with deco software, I don't just trust any guy claiming he can write a good deco program. That's why I rely on proven stuff like DDplan, ProPlanner, DDplan, GAP, Zplanner, vplanner and the like. I've seen to many attempts to deco-programs that would in fact kill you if you were to follow them.....

Also, as an Inspo user, you need the APD Communicator/Logviewer stuff, and you can't expect relatively small companies like APD to come up with a Windows, Mac, Linux and whatever else of their specialised software.
They rather spend their time on new CCR stuff...

ciao,

Tino.