TransDEM for Mac

[TGVLyria]

Hello,
Will there be a version of TransDEM for Mac?

Sorry if there are faults, I am French…

Thank you.

[geophil]

I'm afraid no plans exist for creating a TransDEM version for Apple systems. You should be able to run TransDEM in a virtual Windows environment on Apple Mac.

[LandYrailwayman]

I'm enjoying Trainz on my various Mac hardware and from what I can see TransDEM for Trainz is something I need. However there is the obvious problem of TransDEM being Windows only software and no plans for a native Mac version. Equally I have no plans to get Windows. A virtualisation environment is suggested here.

This forum post:
https://forum.transdem.de/viewtopic.php ... t=Mac#p996

Has a Mac User mentioning Parallels (which requires a copy of windows) positively and:

https://forum.transdem.de/viewtopic.php ... t=Mac#p792

Makes reference to using Crossover (which doesn't require windows) but then is discussing what appear to be transfer problems from Windows to Mac after abandoning Crossover and switching to a native Windows TransDEM on separate Windows PC.

This all raises questions.

- Can any users currently confirm/report success using TransDEM Trainz Edition on a Mac in any/all these environments?

- It it possible to get a free (try before you buy) version of TransDEM to test and confirm it works in Crossover (free trial version) before I pay real money for both?

Thanks.

[geophil]

I had an email conversation with a Mac user the other day, who managed to install TransDEM successfully on a virtual Windows system after a few attempts. The term "Parallels" was mentioned (please forgive me my lack of knowledge in this field).

[tim12rob]

Hi - just confirming that I have been able to use TransDEM fairly easily on a Mac, using a Windows emulator. My setup:

- Hardware is a 2018 Mac mini, 6-core Intel i5 3GHz, 36GB ram, Radeon RX580 8GB eGPU.

- Emulator is VMWare. They offer a free personal / non-commercial use perpetual license, "Fusion Edition". I have used competitors such as VirtualBox in the past for other applications (but not Parallels, which is costly) and I am very impressed with VMWare Fusion. Easy to setup and use, as these things go. It offers full graphics card acceleration support sharing up to 8GB graphics memory, and even supports my eGPU setup.

- Windows 10, installed from an ISO image offered by Microsoft on their site. "Activation" appears to be an optional action if you want, but the OS works fine without this just with a small reminder message in the bottom of the screen.

- Windows is running off an external USB2 spinning hard drive as I have a limited internal SSD, currently using 10GB for virtual hard drive. Even with this the performance has been easily acceptable, no interface lag or long processing times. I assigned 3 cores and 16GB to the virtual machine, and set it to prefer the eGPU.

- File exchange between MacOS and Windows is just copy/paste or drag and drop. Files brought into TRS19 have worked immediately, although I am still working on getting all the detailed export settings in TransDEM right (textures not appearing at decent resolution yet....)


Hope this helps anyone interested in trying out route creation on Mac hardware...

[Cap7546]

Persistence paid off. I have TransDEM working under Crossover. I wanted to use Wine, which is the base project to run Windows programs and is free, however Wine is only built to run up to Mac OS 10.14. I'm running Monterey 12.4 beta.

You need to have crossover running. You need to have extra dependancies for TransDEM to run. I don't know what those dependancies are, however Crossover has archives of "bottles" with the extra dependancies already installed, to save time. Download the archives here https://www.codeweavers.com/support/wik ... orted_deps. I did the Win10 64 bit, and then imported the bottle archive. I then installed TransDEM as an unlisted app in the Win10 64bit bottle that came from the archive. As part of the TranDEM install, I installed the extra Microsoft code. I then activated TransDEM by opening up in TransDEM the license file that is on my Mac desktop. Now to call it a night and try things further another time.