A brief detour. As a Mac and Linux user for some decades, I was none too thrilled to find out the LOR software is Windows only. My entire life I've felt roughly the same about Windows as I do about Mesothelioma. Much searching for Mac ports or other software revealed that I had no choice but to run Windows. I’ve programmed serial devices in the past and even considered writing my own LOR driver, but even the protocol is kept highly proprietary.
So…I wasn’t about to buy a new computer, too, so I went in search of the cheapest substitute.
I found one, free! There are many Windows emulators for modern Macs (Parallels, VMWare, BootCamp). All have drawbacks, mostly price. Enter VirtualBox, a piece of free software currently maintained by Oracle, written by Innotek and open sourced by Sun.
VirtualBox is a marvelous piece of software that allows you to run multiple operating systems at once on one computer. In this case, I chose Windows 7 Home 64 bit. You can download the disk image (iso) from Microsoft at http://technetwindows.blogspot.com/2012/10/windows-7-iso-download-free.html
This gives you a 30 day (or 120 day) trial of fully functioning Windows 7. An hour of downloading later and I had Windows running. Sort of. It kept updating, and rebooting, and updating. Grrr. After about 4 days and 130 or so updates it seems to have settled down.
VirtualBox will let you suspend and resume and keep using your Mac as normal. Some caveats: I have to reinsert the USB cable each time I resume and redo the “AutoConfigure/Refresh” dance to get the software to re-acknowledge the Controller. VirtualBox and OSX seem to compete over the USB ports so you may have issues with things like Printers and iPods too. I usually quit VirtualBox when I’m doing regular Mac stuff. Which turns off my show.
What’s the bottom line? VirtualBox is great and lets you make sequences and control our lights and output sound. I’m running my show off my Mac as I write this. But long term, you’ll probably want a dedicated cheapo Windows machine to run your light show day to day.
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