Just want to know if Poser 5 runs on a Mac through Virtual PC.

I believe someone posted a long time ago that it doesn't work.

personally i think P5 would be way too demanding for VPC. especially when VPC is ocompared to a 300mhz pent II at its fullest capabilities. Best to just wait for the Mac version or something better that comes along.

I have answered that one about 2 months ago, but a-since it keeps coming back... Don't ever think about using processor intensive programs for PC's with VPC on a Mac. You will end up screaming at your puter and tearing all your hair from your head. And having got nothing done. Period. PH

I haven't tried Poser 5 on VPC but just trying to run Microsoft Office with VPC was a joke. (Luckily I was able to pick up the mac version). I called Rino the other day looking for a Mac version and they suggested using VPC and I almost fell of my chair laughing. Not to irritate you PC users but why would anyone want to use an inferior OS on a Mac?

zo, I use a pc, and I agree, winders is the lowest form of os. which mac os are you using? osx is a customised version of my preffered os...linux.

I just read on CL's website that Poser 5 Windows version is not supported using Virtual PC on a Mac

Actually - I'm running Poser4 quite freqently under VPC (for testing purposes) and it works quite reasonably. The initial startup is endless and the mouse is a bit sluggish, but everything else works in an acceptable manner, including rendering (I'm on an 'olde 233/G3, so it doesn't really matter if the render takes 3 (Mac) or 5 (VPC) minutes... :-) Anyway - Poser5 does not install under VPC because of the so called "virtual dongle", and I would guess that they even added code to P5 in order to sabotage its usage. After all, VPC is available for the PC as well (to allow PC users to swap Win versions and complete disk images at will). If they would allow it to run under VPC then users could install it on a disk image and copy that between computers. So - don't even think about buying Poser5 (PC) when you are on Mac.

"So - don't even think about buying Poser5 (PC) when you are on Mac." shouldn't that be poser 5 winblows when you're using a mac? (my pc won't run poser at all it's not winblows)

Poser 5 for the Mac will be along one of these days. Meanwhile, the software goes where the money and the users are, with us poor "inferior" OS using Windows folks :-)

Just to make it clear - I did not made any statement against the PC or its users, I just wanted to state as clear as possible: If you have a Mac and VPC, and if you think about buying Poser5 (PC) hoping that it may run under VPC then keep your money and forget it. As far as "software goes where the money (is)", in case of Poser5 it's rather "software goes where no Unix based OS keeps you from doing dirty tricks with device drivers in order to code some so-called ... ahem ... >protection<". :-)

MartinC, my comment wasn't aimed at you - only a humorous aside at any rate. I've long since given up on religious arguments. Actually, since I have VMWare on my Windows 2K system, I'm thinking of trying freeBSD as a guest OS. I've got the files gathered to run Mac emulation on the PC (albeit the archaic System 8) but I haven't tried it yet. VMWare does an excellent job of running different OSes if they run natively on the hardware. Emulating a different processor in software as in VPC is always going to yield dog slow performance.

~lol~ mine may have been aimed at Martin, but wasn't really upset at him. just pointing out that there are pc's running unix based os and not all pc's are windows.

Wonder if I can find a copy of CP/M 86 anywhere. Now there was an operating system :-)

~lol~ I bet you could if you really wanted to. I found a free version of COBOL the other day.

MartinC: Lemme get this straight. The bulwark against getting P5 on OSX is that they can't translate a software protection scheme, not the app itself?

Duane, I really don't know because I have zero communication with this company, but if you ask me out of the blue then it is very high on my guessing list. I found some public statements very interesting about "Apple refusing to give assistance" (or similar). You can create a list of your system calls with a tool and send it to Apple, and then get a list of everything that won't be supported by Carbon. Depending on the quality of your source (not very good in the case of Poser I guess) this might be a lot of work, but nothing that couldn't be done by professionals. So this "assistance" must be needed for something quite strange. What could it be? System extensions - nope. Plug-in technology - hardly. Special hardware acceleration - they don't support this anyway. User interface - well, maybe. They use the "mercutio" library to hide the menu bar, but they can simply drop this feature for OS-X (it is not in the PC version anyway). They might draw directly into the screen buffer, but they can bypass this with a dummy window (GraphicConverter does that, and it took hardly a couple of days to change the code). So what the heck is so special with P5 that they can't work it out themselves? The virtual dongle requires a lot of very dirty hacking - getting the ethernet card serial, getting device driver code, access harddisk bootblocks, modify them, create bad blocks on the disk, etc. pp. - stuff like that. One of the advantages of OS-X (and you might remember that I'm not a big fan of OS-X yet) is that it prevents applications from doing such tasks. Once again, I have no information about the problems, but if you ask me to guess then I don't have to think very long about my answer.

Steee-VENNN! You gitcher britches down to the woodshed, we're gonna tan yer bee-hind 'til Grammaw c'n read th' Farmer's Almanac by it at night. OK, Martin, points taken very well. However, OSX wouldn't be worth much if it didn't have some kind of support for legit software protection. When I installed the beta for Mimic and took a look at what I took to be an application in ResEdit I was surprised to learn about the existence of application packages. Methinks there has to be something there that CL could use to their advantage to prevent piracy, or is CL (in your best guess) unsatisfied with whatever level of protection this affords? Also, didn't CL say in more than one place that they were trying to make this OS9 compatible as well (which might be hamstringing their options)?

No (sorry folks for diving into technobabble zones :-) The "packages" are only a way to emulate the new OS-X file manager under OS 9. OS-X supports more different forks than the classic data/resource ones, and the technical workaround is to disguise this as a fake folder. I can't think of a decent use for protection as far as this goes. As soon as the application is Carbon it will run under OS 9, so this option wouldn't change anything as well. The fact that Office-X doesn't run under OS 9 was a political decision by MS which no-one really understands, especially if you think about their low sales that subsequentally resulted. As far as protection goes - Apple has a clear policy for years and they didn't change it recently. Basically they encourage software developers to avoid copy protection, but if it's really necessary then they recommend hardware dongles as the only safe alternative. Hardware dongles are indeed supported by OS-X and there are already some high-end apps using them. But if you browse through their technical developer notes and releases you will find that they ULTIMATELY discourage the usage of any hardware hacks in order to implement protection. There is a classic release note about "creating a machine dependent ID" where they discuss possible solutions, but the whole thing is a bit like "don't take any drugs at all, but if you must take drugs then please only use marihuana and don't take heroin, but best don't any drugs at all, really, really, really!!!" :-) They clearly state that this kind of protection is dangerous, unreliable, annoys potential customers and will be a major headache with every new computer model and system software. If anyone sends them an email requesting help with coding one, you sure get a "sod off" message in return... :-)

It isn't often that every time I ask a question in a subject I get reminded how little I know about it. Thanks for bearing with me. If every Mac made since OS8 debuted has an Ethernet card, those Macs de facto have an machine dependent ID. How often do people replace their Ethernet hardware? As for USB... USB seems to be the perfect platform for small, portable dongles, and even wheezers like my G4/USB souped-up 7500 support it. The remaining PCI Mac users out there without native USB would have to spend maybe $70 for a USB+FireWire card, something they probably should have done already. One of the most expensive PC applications I've ever had the pleasure of using (Wilcom's Sirius embroidery digitizing suite, $30K US) uses a card dongle and the traveling salesmen demonstrating it on laptops use a USB dongle. [My educated guess is that buried in a legitimate software-critical system interrupt, something sends an unobvious high-level request passed through other legitimate routines eventually to the dongle, the dongle belches back a code, the code is eventually factored into a return address for one of several common subroutines, without which the software will have an inaccurate return address and crash. Hackers are then tasked with deconstructing miles of assembly code in several libraries to figure out the paper trail back to the dongle, black-box its algorithm and substitute their own software mechanism. Of course, I'm wildly speculating here with a novelist's imagination, not a coder's.] Am I being incredibly naive to assume that any future MacOS compatibility issue with USB dongles would also likely apply to a large portion of supported USB hardware (i.e., have to be resolved by either Apple or the vendor) and thereby render the taboo irrelevant?

You are right with the Ethernet Card - and it is amazing how much folks once panicked when the Pentium III got the CPU serial, while most of them have the same sort of unique ID on their network card long time before and ever after without bothering... The problem with the Ethernet Card is that it is quite simple to disguise, hide or even "fake change" the serial with a bit of hacking tools. VPC, for example, can simply turn off the Mac card for the "PC" (for a performance boost) and thereby make the PC "cardless". The USB dongles would certainly be the best solution for a protection (and if you buy them from a good company they may be even able to supply older PC/serial or Mac/ADB ones on request). One of the official answers was that they are "expensive" (as if it would matter if a completely overpriced, useless-by-bugs piece of crashware gets up another $20 :-) and that "professional companies" are afraid that the dongles get stolen. That may (or may not) be true, but I guess the number of people who keep their money because of the virtual dongle is hardly any smaller... I got a dongle for Quark4 /Passport for about two years and it never caused any trouble - plugged it into the ADB socket, plugged the keyboard/mouse cable into the dongle socket, and then forgot about it. Now I got Quark5/Passport, and the dongle - is gone! It was probably cracked just like every other protection before, virtual or real, it was extra costs, it upset customers, and so Quark simply decided to trust their users again. Thank you Quark, you are a great company! I am absolutely convinced that the best protection is to CARE about the user, and to give the legal and honest users a reward for buying the software (like a printed manual, etc.) rather than trying to punish everyone like a chemo-therapy. When I bought Carrara from Eovia and registered, suddenly a few weeks later I got a surprise update/patch CD by mail. Without requesting! Just - "thanks for buying our software, here's the latest bugfix". It's the pirates who need to run for the patches, the honest users get them for free, and without need to download, burn and backup... :-) However, if you try to squeeze out money of software which is buggy-like-hell and simply ignore user complaints, reports and requests (Hello Mac PPP!) you probably need to handcuff and gag users in order to get their money again & again... If InDesign made Quark change their user policy then it is HIGH TIME for a Poser competitor. 'Nuff said, MartinC

Attached Link: http://lismoresoft.com/

hardware dongle Dont work!!!! as a protection scheme :-) programmers just write small patches(Kraks) that disable the part of the application code that looks for the dongle on start up Just ask anybody( off the record) in the lightwave, 3DSMAX, combustion, After effects pro, Apple DVD studio pro etc, etc,, communituies. Many of these Patches originate from the software publishers themselves for in house use to defray the cost of dongleing EVERY machine in the testing department. NO software is hack proof Sorry...... but thats the reality.