TopoFusion working on Mac OS X!

[Metzen]

Woohoo!

I am a long time user of TopoFusion and love it.  I switched to OS X a few months ago for a myriad of reasons, and the one thing I missed was TopoFusion.

The new version of Parallels Desktop just came out, and supports running DirectX games and applications.

I installed it and for the most part TopoFusion works perfectly.  There were some weird video problems when I would resize the window, but getting the windows size I want, exiting, and then reloading TF fixes the problem.

Just thought any other Mac OS X users might like to know.

Thanks,
Brian

[Krein]

Excellent, thanks for posting this!

Definitely good to know.  Glad you got it working.

[Metzen]

Just an update to this.  The latest Parallels update now works even smoother with TF.

Make sure to resize the Parallels window to a native resolution (ie. 1280 x 1024, etc, rather than the random sizes it chooses on its own).  If you resize TF the tiles go weird until you restart TF.

The 3D now works surprisingly good!

Great news for use Mac TF users.

[tgelston]

Does the connection to a GPS work? Downloading tracks too?  

Thanks for posting!

Wondering,
Tobias

[Metzen]

A quick update on TopoFusion under Mac OS X (you can read here for the whole story,  http://www.topofusion.com/cgi-bin/forum/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=1;t=1986):

The long and short of it is that the latest TF Pro no longer works at all under Parallels, as of this writing.

However, using VMWare Fusion Beta 1.1 and TF Basic it is working 100% from what I can tell.

2D and 3D work great, and my GPS transfer went smooth as silk.

So that is the most workable combination so far, and it seems to be 100% (or close to it).

Metzen

[Krein]

Hi,

I've been getting more requests for Mac support, or at least good emulation.

Any update with the latest version of Parallels and TF Pro?

I'm a little confused as to what broke it -- was it a new version of Parallels, or a new version of TF Pro?

If that latter, I'd like to figure out what happened.  Maybe debug it a little to see if we can't get it rolling in Parallels.

Any info appreciated.

[brentb]

It's been a while since I've posted, but I've been using TF for a few years, albeit less so since migrating to a mac.

Last year I tried VMWare Fusion with TF and was very impressed with how well it worked under emulation on my Macbook Pro. Unfortunately, I don't remember the version combination of VMWare and TF used then.

I am presently running TF Pro 3.32, under XP SP2, on VMWare Fusion 1.1.1. In Fusion, 3D acceleration is enabled.

The problems I see are:
* delayed rendering. The view isn't always updated when zooming with the mouse scroll wheel, for example. Or moving with arrow keys, or grabbing & dragging.
* eventual tile corruption. After manipulating the display "a bit", tiles are no longer displayed correctly. It looks like the graphics emulation gets tiles/textures mixed up.

With 3d acceleration disabled in fusion, TF doesn't start (no D3D Device).

I'll look to see if I have any older versions of TF around. I'll also try the Basic version and see how that works.

[brentb]

I just saw in Metzen's post above that he tried TF Basic with VMWare Fusion. I just tried this combination, too, and it works very well.

Rendering is smooth, and I don't see the graphics lag/tile corruption as with TF Pro.

For now I'll use the Basic version.

[redtabby]

I've been very happy running TopoFusion under VMware Fusion on OSX with a 32bit WinXP VM.  I've upgraded my hosting hardware and I am thinking about trying a Windows 7 VM to host TF this time.  Since the only point of running Windows is to host TF, I am wondering - is Win7 a performance upgrade or pessimization for whatever resources that TF makes the most use of?  I am thinking that a 64-bit OS will help TF.  Anyone see a performance bump or tailoff with TF going from XP to Win7?

[Jimt]

I've got Topofusion 4.22 running on VMware and everything seemed to work just fine, except then I noticed that the Mac keyboard doesn't have an insert key, and the delete key doesn't produce any response. So I am effectively unable to some of the essential functions like cutting tracks, or inserting more points, etc. Any idea how I can emulate the Insert and delete functions on the MacBook Pro keyboard?
Jim Thayer 

[Jimt]

The only way I've been able to overcome the missing insert key issue is to use an external keyboard. Otherwise, no one seems to have cracked this problem - especially as it is keyboard (not OS) specific. Jim Thayer

[berck]

Have you tried using fn + enter? I've heard a number of people say that works.

http://chrisbensen.blogspot.com/2011/04/no-insert-key-on-mac-keyboard.html

[markj2911]

Berck,

I have used that function and it really works. There are many more shortcuts also works.