DAC and software for Mac OS X

If mac's are immune to viruses, why, may I ask is Steve Jobs dead?

I always thought "Mac Viruses" were actually the Mac Anti-Virus software packages trying to address a non-existent threat. Most Mac viruses, if you can call them that, are the result of social engineering brought on, not least of all, by the belief that Macs can't get viruses (so why not click on all the links and software right?).

Most of the people I know think MAC is superior to any other operating system and some think that MAC computers are cheap. I don't know how that came into their head but it did and they are just making fools of themselves.

There isn't any programs, to my knowledge, that are Mac compatible. I just ran bootcamp and installed W7 on my Macbook Pro. The funniest part is the other day I had to drop it off for a warranty repair because it wouldn't boot up in the Mac OS, but it would in Windows. LOL, go figure

Someone was doing a laserboy port to the Mac -- not sure if he succeeded. Since the Mac is a Unix variant -- as is Linux -- there's a lot of software that ends up getting ported.

If you can't find a ready-to-run Mac version, then probably the easiest solution is to buy a copy of VMware Fusion (about $50 last I checked) and download and install Linux in a virtual machine -- or you could get a copy of VirtualBox (VirtualBox.org -- it's basically like VMware or Parallels except it's open-source and available free.)

It might be possible to compile Laserboy with MacPorts.
You can try wine or parallels desktop.

Laserboy is only a frame creation tool, not really much point trying to port it if you're looking for show control.

A guy from Moscow, Russia just joined The LaserBoy Forum and between the two of us, we've gotten pretty far with getting LaserBoy to compile and run in Mac OSX.

Everything works great except when you try to open a bitmap into the background of the frame to trace over it. It opens, but the color bytes are in the wrong order. (You can still see it!)

I would really like to work with other Mac users to get this perfect. LaserBoy would be the only truly sophisticated laser show software for Mac OSX!

BTW LaserBoy is a lot more than just a frame creation tool.

Yes, it does that, but it also reads DXF files and directories, converts waves into vector art that can be saved as ild and makes waves of full color animations that can be played through the LaserBoy DAC.... Plus a whole lot more!

The C-Media 8 channel USB sound device that is commonly used to make the LaserBoy DAC works great in Mac OSX and Linux!

The OP mentioned wanting to display text. LaserBoy knows how to render the TEXT elements of DXF files and you can also drop text into a frame right through the LaserBoy drawing interface. It renders font by ASCII numbers from an ordered ild file. It comes with Lucida Console and Courier New. You can make any another font face you like, if you can render all of the visible characters as individual ordered frames.

James.

Strange that your bytes are in the wrong order. You're on an x86 architecture right? The basic operations should be the same as a Windows machine if so. Also the file formats should be read in the same way regardless of platform. Are the BMP files you're attempting to trace just written with different color-byte orderings?

That's what I would have thought too. But I guess the video ram is arranged a little different on a Mac.

I have to give the guy a lot of credit. He figured out how to install the C++ compiler and the SDL libs, plus the most recent version of Boost C++. Then he figured out how to add some stuff to the Makefile.osx that was my reasonable guess that comes with LaserBoy. On top of that, the newest version of Boost has some changes in the filesystem lib that he had to adjust my code to get around. He did all of that and got it to compile before he posted anything on our LaserBoy Forum.

Since then, I changed a few things and in a Skype conversation he found a couple of other places in the code that needed an adjustment.

All of this needs to be done in a way that doesn't break the compile for Windows and Linux.

I remember a few years ago I ported my code to try to use fltk the Fast Light Tool Kit for Qt. I had to rearrange the order of the RGB bytes to get that to work as well. I thought that was pretty weird.

All of the files in question are completely standard, like ild, txt, dxf, wav, bmp. They all open just fine in other applications that take these types.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to compile and install the new Boost C++ libs for Windows using mingw and Dev-C++. I did it ounce before, but it's kind-of a pain. I'm sure it's not really necessary, but I want the same version for Windows that is available through MacPorts (for Mac OSX). Building it for Linux is easy!

James.

Boost should be pretty easy to compile. They did a good job streamlining it. I usually use MSVC, but other compilers on Windows should be just as easy with their b2 building system. Really nice stuff. Glad you're using boost, always good stuff.

I guess Boost is pretty easy to compile, but the online instructions to do so are pretty weak.

First off, I downloaded the zip file of the whole thing and it's corrupted. I tried it on two different computers. So I just went with what I got out of it. It seems to be OK.

I searched for "boost Dev-C++" and found a few blog entries with some examples and put those together to figure it out.

When you go to build Boost.Build, you have to tell it that you are using mingw as a tool set. Once you get that built, then you have bjam.exe. You use that to build the boost libs. You have to tell it that you are using gcc (not mingw).

I gave it a path that pointed to where I had unzipped the boost stuff, thinking it would write the compiled libs there. It went through the whole process and when I looked there I couldn't find anything new. So I gave up for the night and fifgured I'd go at it again later.

When I came back to it, I looked at the root of my drive and saw two folders with exactly the same name. I have no idea how this is even possible, but there it was. In one of them was the stuff I unzipped and in the other was all of the "include" and "lib" stuff that I needed. So I just moved that into the appropriate folders inside of my Dev-C++ installation and all is well.

I'm going to go over all the code very carefully to look for any place where the color bytes might be rearranged and put out a new release very soon that should compile without a hitch on Mac OSX!

James.

Is the byte-ordering for the video mode the same? Maybe just that has changed if you're using something like SDL. If you're doing byte-packing yourself, that can also affect things.

With boost and Dev-C++, I think you just link things up in the same manner as any library. If you compile boost again (for example, for release vs debug, etc.) try putting "-j8" in the command line to multiprocessor build your stuff:

I think I got it!

http://laserboy.org/code/LaserBoy_2012_03_22.zip

James.

Is anyone out there willing to try to compile this and give it a go?

From what I understand, all you need to do is go to MacPorts and install CMake, then get the current libSDL and the current Boost C++.

Download http://laserboy.org/code/LaserBoy_2012_03_22.zip. Unzip it. Open a command shell. Go to .../LaserBoy/src and issue:

bash# make -f Makefile.osx

If all goes well, you will have an executable at the root of the LaserBoy directory.

Run it like this:

Go back one directory to the root.

bash# cd ../

bash# ./LaserBoy 800 600

where 800 and 600 are the width and height of the window that LaserBoy will open and populate. Make it any size you want.

(I just got word from the guy in Moscow that it works!)

James.

I'm pretty sure we've gotten this sorted out through questions and answers in a kind-of remote control....

I do not own a Mac! I've never really spent any time in front of one.

My questions is this:

Is it possible for a Mac owner to compile this code into a binary executable that might be distributed within the LaserBoy zip that will work in any and all flavors of Mac OSX?

That would be nice. I'm sure there are a lot of Mac owners out there who might want to try LaserBoy but would never want to go through the steps necessary to compile it on their own machine.

Thanks!

James.