RailPro User Group
RailPro => RailPro Specific Help & Discussion => Topic started by: MAC on May 20, 2025, 03:23:30 PM
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Calling all RailPro Mac users,
May I encourage you all to contact Ring Engineering and ask them to either make a MAC-compatible version of RailPro Assistant or to create a web-based version (as they've told me they plan to do - eventually) that will work on PCs or Macs?
When I approached Ring with this request, the response was dismissive: Ring are convinced there aren't enough Mac users among their customers to warrant such an undertaking. Would you please take a moment to contact Ring and tell them they're wrong in this presumption? We may not, in fact, be a large group, but I'm sure there are enough of us to justify - indeed, demand - providing this customer service.
Thank you for your consideration, time and, hopefully, action.
MAC
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The mac's have 15% of the US market in pc's....
RP is a small company, and it costs time and money to develop a second version and support it with the needed regression testing.
put a virtual machine on your mac and then load windows is the best thing to do
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I’m in the same boat with having MacBook Pro equipment I still am holding out on buying all the Railpro stuff I’ll be needing to do 22+ locos and all the controllers and accessories. Not really wanting to now have to purchase and mess with Windows on a MacBook because of this.
Was holding onto hope the Mac version was soon to be offered like other things have both available. Been contemplating how to manuver this quandary.
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I have a MacBook Pro with Parallels installed to run Windows 11 and RailPro works. But if you have any issues, he won’t be able to help. It does sometimes have an issue of connecting to their website (internet) so you have to try multiple times. He has no ideas so I just live with it. There is some configuring to get the Comm port set, but once done it works fine. Owning a small software company, what Greg said is exactly correct. It’s a resources for amount of potential issue.
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Another option is to buy a cheap laptop, can be had for $200 new (just bought an Asus L210)
windows 11, brand new...
It's not the end of the world to learn enough of windows to just run a program... then you have the approved platform if you have issues.
The other alternative is get a good MAC friend to set you up with a virtual drive or parallels or a dual boot.. still if it has issues, people may blame the environment for problems.
(surely your Mac Book Pro was WAY over $200 !!! )
Greg
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Greg is correct, a cheap windows laptop is probably the best solution.
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I'm using my Macbook with Bootcamp partitioned off for windows RailPro. Works good except sometimes I forget how to jump back and forth!
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Sometime back when I did a show and tell at the local club with the usage of RailPro, two members said it was very interesting but since RP does not work with Apple, they both said no deal. Also one of the members asked about using RP in N scale engines? Well we all know that answer. Too bad but RP could have been more user friendly. Oh ya, I had to buy a cheap PC but it went belly up sometime back and I'm not going to buy another one. Your version ?
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Another option is to buy a cheap laptop, can be had for $200 new (just bought an Asus L210)
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It's not the end of the world to learn enough of windows to just run a program... then you have the approved platform if you have issues.
Buying another piece of hardware to use it for just that one purpose is not the way forward and just compounds the problem.
Anyway, you don't have to use Windows to run RPA and HC Sim, though it is of course much simpler. 5 years ago I demonstrated getting both RPA and HC Sim working on Linux with Wine. Yes the journey to make it work was definitely not in the realm of everyday users but it was possible and one user successfully followed my instructions and got it going themselves. Wine is also available for macOS 10.15.4 and later. On the virtual machine front I also at one time had RPA and HC Sim working on ReactOS (basically a free opensource clone of Windows). This would likely still work with a compatibility version patch to RPA and HC Sim.
- Tim
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simpllifying the install and costing less in time and money compounds the problem?
buy a cheap laptop, leave it "static", no updates, no changes... that simplifies things
then your "primary" computer that MUST be updated no longer can mess up your simple task of programming..
I don't get your logic, but let's not start an argument.
Greg