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USB in an unsupported APP?

Hi, all. I just installed MX900 - software to program my Universal Remote. The installation went fine, the app opens, but I can't get it to connect to the remote via USB. I'm a complete Windows idiot - never owned a PC, total Mac nerd.

Is it possible to get USB connectivity in an unsupported app, or am I maybe just doing something wrong?

Thanks.

Scott

The answer is most likely no, USB connectivity in this way is not supported by CrossOver.

The long story is that custom USB devices in general need a device driver to work. CrossOver does not have a Windows kernel, so it does not have a place to load the device driver supplied by the app. If you have a USB device that you want to use with CrossOver, you need a MacOS driver for it, install it, and the CrossOver uses the hardware independent resource offered by OSX.

Take for example a USB Harddisk: You attach it, MacOS loads the usb storage driver and mounts the disk. CrossOver then sees that there is a device mounted, and fakes a device letter for the mountpoint. CrossOver does not care what type of disk it is.

This works fine and out of the box for standard devices - Hard disks, keyboards, sound cards, network adapters etc.

On the other side this means that any device that does not have a Mac driver doesn't work in CrossOver, and CrossOver consequently cannot be used to run the Windows driver to offer services for OSX(e.g. you can't load a Windows driver for an unsupported scanner and have that scanner show up in your mac apps). We may support that some day in the future though. We have a faked windows kernel which we use to load copy protection drivers. General hardware drivers won't work that way because a user land faked kernel cannot use Interrupts, DMA and other HW resources. USB devices are special though. Many drivers can potentially work. We don't have any specific plans for that yet however.

There is one potential workaround for your situation though: Many custom USB devices are technically just USB-to-serial adapters. When you attach them, MacOS can handle them, and you get a serial device node(on Linux it would be called /dev/ttyUSBx, I don't know about Mac). CrossOver supports serial devices, so you can tell CrossOver to forward this as, say, COM4(it's tricky, but it can be done). The most likely problem then is that this appears as a standard serial port for the Windows app, not a USB device, and it most likely still won't find the device.

Please Note: This Forum is for non-application specific questions relating to installation/configuration of CrossOver. All application-specific posts to this Forum will be moved to their appropriate Compatibility Center Forum.

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