I was just curious - can I copy my Poser 8 Runtime to a Mac and retain functionality? I was considering trying and moving my installation to my new Mac but was worried about losing access to my characters and work.

  Thank you in advance,
  White Raven

 PC format files are not compatible with mac.

You can give it a shot. But Id use a copy. I am doubting it will work as Mac uses an entirely different set of file extensions for oh, just about everything. Not to mention, it may have issues with pre-existing directory paths if it is coming from a PC.

white, i think it might work.  poser files are now cross-platform. the folder structures have minor
differences, e.g. thumbs.db would probly be ignored by poser 8 X, but I dunno.  however, all
absolute paths would be wrong, of course - no C drive.  so all paths would hafta be fixed, or
use "deep search" in prefs.

You may have to do a fresh installation, cause yeah the runtime could point to a C drive ....
my husband has done it but some stuff doesnt work, like daz stuff.
Rendo products work just fine caues there is no C drive in their filenames, it just says
Runtime:libraries:pose etc etc ....

 I think, actually I am certain, if you just copy your runtimes across it will be absolutely fine as far as your characters saved as Cr2s and all your poser content.  However your pz3s may possibly have trouble locating stuff, but actually they will probably be okay too.  anyway if you copy it and try it you've still got your original PC stuff anyway. I really do think it will work. I've used both and done the same thing myself with no problem.

 just copy the runtmes, not your actual other files to do with the running of poser eg .exe or your actual poser application etc
Gone are the days of needing softrabbit etc that makers of content still refer to.  It's not needed for modern versions of poser.  Poser reads the PC path names and mac path names, pz2s etc without problem interchangeably.

One thing to be careful of, which is the major difference when using mac compared to PC with poser folders.  remember on a pc if you drop a folder say, called runtime into another folder called runtime it will merge the contents of the two runtimes.
On a mac it is different. If you do that you will replace all the folders inside runtime with the folders of your new runtime.
If you want to merge to folders rather than replace every subfolder and file, then you need to use Kaveman's utility called ditto, which I use every single day of my poser life for merging folders together.
But yes, the runtimes work exactly the same, no need to alter anything - just copy your folders across, and merge rather than replace if you want to keep some other stuff that you had previously on the mac version.
Love esther

It should work-Poser dropped absolute paths long ago.  You could just copy the runtme over and add it to as an external runtime, but what I would do, is to copy the Windows Poser Runtime to the Poser installation path on the Mac, then install Poser.  The Poser installation will then overwrite the files that need to be overwritten.

If you have already installed Poser, you could copy the Mac Runtime to another folder, copy the Windows Runtime into your Poser folder, allowing it to overwrite, then copy the Mac copy back, which will overwrite what needs to be overwritten.

The only issue might be file name/directory case, but Windows does preserve case, even though it isn't case sensitive itself...

EDIT I just reread esther's post above, and I didn't realise that the OSX  GUI didn't merge when copying.  (I'm familiar with UNIX, which is what OS X is under that pretty GUI) You could use the 'cp' command in a command shell, which does merge.  If you open the shell in the folder containing the Runtime folder; cp -r -f /Runtime '/path to poser folder'

More info here:  http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?cp

OOPS-There's a typo in my shell command, and the edit time expired. 

it should be cp -r -f Runtime '/path to poser folder'

The way I had it written originally  with the leading slash ahead of 'Runtime' would only work if you had the Runtime in the Root directory, which is quite unlikely...

  Thank you for replying Leviatas.Miss Nancy, Artemis, estherau, and WandW! I really appreciate the
help! :) I wanted to ask - estherau, where I could find ditto, please?

  Thank you again,
  White Raven

 kaveman is a member here.  You'll need to send him a message.
I tried to google his website but couldn't find it.   I'll keep looking.
Thank goodness you didn't accidentally replace your whole mac runtime whilst I was away watching my chuck DVDs.  well actually it wouldn't have mattered probably unless you already had added content into your mac version, all you would have had to do is reinstall your mac poser, and it would probably have all been fine.
Love esther

Attached Link: http://www.ilike.co.nz/SoftwareDev/dittoGUI.html

AFAIK, ditto is a standard command line tool (see -> http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/ditto.1.html) but there is also dittoGUI which I've seen mentioned several times (see attached link).

 well done!  such a useful application. I can drop a whole lot of zips onto it if I want and it will unzip them and put them all into one runtime.  But actually I mostly keep my runtimes separate.  I have used it with about 20 zips at once though when I had a whole bunch of stuff from one site that was set out nicely in good runtimes with nicely organized subfolders (adam thwaites site).
Love esther

I am using a PC created Runtime on a Mac. Works flawlessly. Granted, I'm not using Matmatic or anything like that, but Runtime files are platform independent.

edit: .exe installers won't work, but jpegs, cr2, etc. will

Not sure why you mentioned matmatic - there is only one set of files for that, Mac or PC. Works on both. That's not something that needs to be a caveat.

  Thanks again, everyone, for your help. I feel a lot more confidant in using my Mac - I'm going to copy my Runtime from PC to an external disk drive (needs a new backup anyhow), then copy the external drive's data to the Mac. I really appreciate the help and support, thank you all for helping me with this. Thia Mac doesn't like dittoGUI, I think Snow Leopard is being persnickitty. :/ Off now to copy the monstrosity that is my Runtime (somehow I have a TON more stuff than when I started out- who knew I had 3 gigs of stuff in my Runtime! Whew!)

 Thanks again,
  White Raven

 good luck.
did you try ditto purely on your mac, not using it from your P to your mac or anything weird?
It works fine on mine with snow leopard OS 6.3
Love esther

Just to clarify.. Poser Content (and Scene Files) are Universal. I have all my Runtimes on a Network Drive and access them from both PCs and MACs. There are some products (Scripts etc...) that are Platform specific, but for figures, poses, textures, etc... they both should work on either platform.