Legal notice: If you read beyond this paragraph, you do so with the understanding and agreement on your part that all the information and advice in this article are provided entirely at your risk. You absolve and hold harmless the author of this page, Alchemy Mindworks and its related corporate entities, as well as the stockholders, shareholders, employees and suppliers thereof for any loss, damage or expense arising from your use of the information provided herein, including but not exclusive to attorney's fees and costs, however they may occur. You acknowledge that some of the references in this article are to technologies not developed by or under the control of the author of this page or Alchemy Mindworks, and over which they have no control. The lawyers made us say that.

In a perfect world, there would be a single, universal operating system for computers, and it would be stable, flawless, inalterable and supported by its developer at no cost. In addition, in said perfect world, elected officials would be honorable and trustworthy, consumer goods would cost what they're worth rather than what the market will bear and green would be a color rather than a religion.

If such a world existed, we'd live there, and you wouldn't be reading this.

In this world, there are several largely incompatible, funky and effectively unsupported operating systems. Windows is one of them, and while it's the most widely used, there are workable alternatives. You could, for example, use a Macintosh.

The current generation of Macintosh computers are powerful and affordable if you don't look too closely at your credit card bill. The OS X operating system installed on Macs is almost worth the price of the computer all by itself, just to watch it work. The catch inherent in Macs, however, is that relatively speaking, almost nobody uses them. Depending upon whose statistics you choose to believe, Macintoshes account for something like five percent of all the personal computers on Earth as of this writing.

While this probably makes them cool, elite and esoteric, it also means that software developers have a relatively small incentive to create applications to run on a Mac. The unspeakable coolness of Macintosh systems has long been offset to a large degree by a paucity of applications for them.

As much as we'd like to port our Windows applications to run under the Macintosh's OS X operating system, the reality of doing so is seriously daunting. Creating a port of one of our applications to run on a Mac would involve an undertaking just this side of a total re-write, and thousands of hours of work.

It's not likely to happen any time soon.

There is, however, a way to run Windows software — including most of our stuff — on a Mac without rewriting much of anything. You can install an open-source, no-cost addition to OS X called Wine, which provides duplicates of the Windows software interface, or API, to Windows applications running on a Macintosh. This, in effect, tricks Windows software into thinking it's running under Windows while it stealthily translates all the software's calls and requests into comparable functions that exist on a Mac.

This document will discuss installing Darwine — the Wine implementation specific to the Macintosh — installing Alchemy Mindworks applications under Wine and the issues involved therein. Please keep in mind that it, like Wine — and as has been said of late, like Windows — is a work in progress.

Did we mention this isn't a perfect world?

You can find out more about Wine at Wine HQ. Wine is easy to install — most of the time — and considering what it does, it works surprisingly well.

As you might imagine, this isn't the same as working perfectly.

Before you start getting your brain wrapped around Wine, it's probably worth pointing out that Wine was written to run under the Linux operating system, frequent references to which will be encountered at the Wine HQ web page. While it's cool and shiny and more user-friendly than an eight-month-old Labrador retriever, the Macintosh OS X operating system is actually a species of Linux under the hood. It's possible to install the Linux implementation of Wine on a Mac and have it work therein with relatively little head-bashing, but even this isn't necessary.

There's a Macintosh-specific version of Wine, called Darwine, and it requires no head-bashing at all.

As an aside, there's a Linux-specific version of this article available, should you have arrived at this page by mistake.

It's probably worth mentioning that Wine can be used successfully under the Macintosh Leopard operating system. It will probably run under Tiger, although we haven't tried it. It won't run on older Macintosh systems, especially those that were built before Macintoshes began being running Intel processors. Those old Macs look very nice if you can persuade some ivy to grow through the ventilating slots in their cases, or if you remove their monitors and make them into aquariums.

There is said to be an Intel emulator in the works for use with Wine, which will allow it to run on pre-Intel Macintosh systems. Should you have an older Mac and no need of an aquarium, you might want to check the Wine HQ page, above, to see how this is progressing.

It's also worth noting that using Wine on a Macintosh is not comparable to using one of the software solutions that allows a Macintosh to run Microsoft Windows, such as Apple's BootCamp. In running Windows software under Wine, the software in question will behave more or less like a native Macintosh application. In addition, you won't have to buy a license for Windows. In fact, you won't have to buy anything other than the Windows software you actually want to run.

The Darwine package for Macintosh Leopard can be downloaded at no cost from its maintainer. As of this writing, you can get it from Zach Drayer's web page. The Wine package itself was created by a number of programmers — Zach Drayer maintains the Macintosh implementation.

As with all Macintosh application software, you should not install or run Darwine when you're logged into your system using an account with Administrator privileges. Darwine expects to be installed from a normal user account. As of this writing, it will not install correctly if it's installed through an Administrator account, and nothing to be discussed hereafter will work.

To install Darwine, download the latest stable release of the software. Darwine is distributed as a Macintosh disk image package. Double-click on it to open it, and then double-click on the Darwine package. The installer will run, with the usual request that you accept its license.

The developers of Darwine appear fond of the graphic to the right, of a cartoon character holding a wine glass. You'll encounter it frequently as you work with Darwine.

Once your Darwine installation is complete, you can run Darwine from the Finder. Locate the Darwine entry in Applications, and double-click on WineHelper.app. Select Open from the Applications menu of WineHelper to run a Windows application.

To ensure that Darwine has installed correctly and is generally behaving itself, you should run one of the example Windows applications that installs with it before you try something serious. Having selected Open in WineHelper, navigate to the Sample Applications folder and run notepad.exe.

The first time you run a Windows application under Darwine, the Wine implementation will create some files and perform a number of initial housekeeping tasks. This won't happen in the future.

It will also boot an X11 window, X11 being the part of Leopard that Wine uses to simulate Windows.

The process of installing Darwine will create a folder structure on your hard drive to represent the C: drive of a Windows system. It resides in a hidden directory called .wine in the home folder of the user who installed it. As such, if your user name is admin, the directory /Users/admin will include a folder called .wine.

You can investigate Darwine's folders by opening the Finder window for your primary hard drive. Make sure you're looking at the List view and select your user name from the list of places along the left side.

Wine installs its Windows components in a hidden folder, so you'll need to make sure you've enabled viewing hidden folders in the Finder window you're using — click on the magnifying glass with a line through it at the top of your Finder window.

You should find a sub-folder in your home folder called .wine — the period at the beginning of its name indicates that it's hidden. Double-click on it and you'll find several sub-folders, one of which will be named drive_c. The drive_c folder represents the root of the synthetic Windows hard drive that's running on your Mac.

In the event that you can't persuade the Finder to show you hidden files, use the Go menu and select Go To Folder. With the Users folder selected, enter your account name followed by a forward slash and the name of the hidden folder you'd like to open, in this case .wine. If your account name is admin, for example, you'd enter admin/.wine to point the Finder to your .wine folder. All the folders under .wine are conventional, non-hidden folders, and you'll be able to deal with them without any further head-bashing.

Double-click on the drive_c folder and you'll find two sub-folders, Program Files and Windows. The Program Files folder is where all your Windows software will be installed. The Windows folder is where the various low-level Windows components reside. When Windows software is installed, the installer knows to place it in Program Files — you won't have to drill down to this part of your hard drive on a regular basis.

The Windows folder includes libraries that duplicate the core functionality of Windows, as viewed by a Windows application, but none of the software that installs with real Windows. As such, common applications such as WordPad and Paint aren't available under Darwine — the latter may prove to be a problem.

Wine is now good to go.

While a simple Windows application will now run under Wine, there are several things that a complete Alchemy Mindworks application will find missing. The first one is a library called msvcp60.dll, which most of our software likes to have on hand. In its absence, applications like GIF Construction Set and Graphic Workshop won't run under OS X, and perhaps more annoyingly still, they won't say why they're misbehaving.

You can address this by downloading msvcp60.dll and copying it to the .wine/drive_c/Windows/System32 folder on your Macintosh. You'll need to navigate to your Darwine folder structure, as discussed above, and drag the msvcp60.dll file to System32. Alternately, you can have Winetricks install it for you — Winetricks will be discussed later in this article.

The second problem is slightly more obscure. Alchemy Mindworks software stores its documentation as HTML documents, which require a web browser to view them. Macintoshes install with the Safari web browser, but this is a Mac application, not a Windows application. A Windows application that wants to open an HTML document won't have access to the Mac installation of Safari.

The first thing you'll need to install under Darwine, then, is Firefox. Visit the Firefox web page, download the Windows version of Firefox and double-click on it. It will install under Wine.

As of this writing, some builds of Firefox run somewhat imperfectly under Wine. When you get around to viewing the Manual documents installed with Alchemy Mindworks software, you may note that:

• The animations therein are broken, or don't display correctly.
• The typeface used for body text looks a bit odd.
  
  

Neither of these issues should affect your use of the Manual documents.

You're now ready to install some actual software under Wine. In this example, we're going to install GIF Construction Set Professional 3. The installation procedure discussed herein should be applicable to any contemporary Alchemy Mindworks application.

To begin with, you should have GIF Construction Set Professional 3 patch 25 or better to complete this installation. Earlier versions of the 3.0 software will work, but typically with a few catches and cosmetic nasties. The sordid truth about Wine is that it's not an entirely seamless Windows environment, and we've had to touch up the software to make it workable therein.

Run WineHelper, as discussed earlier, and use the Open function in its Application menu to locate and run the gcsp30.exe installer for GIF Construction Set Professional. Alternately, just locate the gcsp30.exe file in a Finder window and double-click on it to run Wine and open the installer. Work through the installation screens — it's all pretty much self-explanatory. It's a profoundly good idea to allow the installer to install GIF Construction Set to its default folder.

We'd like to take this opportunity to note that if you use Alchemy Mindworks software to do productive work, even if it's running on a Mac while it's doing it, you need to register it. Should you enable the Install for Evaluation option during installation, please keep this in mind.

There are two issues you might encounter in running the installer:

1. Toward the end of the installation, a window titled Program Manager may open. Program Manager is a function under Windows that creates desktop icons. As this isn't handled the same way on a Mac, Darwine will open a window to indicate that something it doesn't quite understand is happening. Just close this window.
2. You'll see a warning about the installer's inability to open the What's New document. It needs Word or WordPad to do this, neither of which are available in a new installation of Wine. You can safely ignore this.
   
   

You might see an Alchemy Mindworks installation advertisement window when the installation is complete. This is part of the installation process.

GIF Construction Set is now ready to rock... mostly.

Installing GIF Construction Set Professional 3 should have created a Darwine icon on your Macinosh desktop for GIF Construction Set. Double-click on it and GIF Construction Set should run. Alternately, you can run GIF Construction Set through a Finder window by navigating to your Wine folder structure, or through WineHelper, as discussed earlier.

We too were shocked when this actually worked.

In the event that it doesn't work for you — that is, if you double-click on the GIF Construction Set Professional icon and nothing happens — the most likely cause of the problem is GIF Construction Set proving to be unable to find msvcp60.dll, as discussed earlier in this document. Make sure you've installed it in your \windows\system32 folder.

There are circumstances which will prevent Wine from creating a desktop shortcut for a Windows application. This is inconvenient, if it happens, as you'll have to navigate to your Wine folder structure in a Finder window every time you want to run GIF Construction Set. To install a desktop shortcut, or more properly, an alias, by hand:

1. Navigate to your Wine folder structure, as discussed earlier in this article.
2. Open the drive_c folder.
3. Open the Program Files folder.
4. Open the Alchemy Mindworks folder. This folder was created by the GIF Construction Set installer.
5. Open the GIF Construction Set Professional 3 folder.
6. Locate the file GCSPRO.EXE and click on it.
7. Select Make Alias from the File menu of the Finder. A new entry will be created, named GCSPRO.EXE.alias.
8. Click and drag the alias to your desktop.
9. Click once in the name of the alias to edit it, and rename it to something more intuitive, like GIF Construction Set Professional 3.
   
   

That took a longer to explain than it will take you to do.

When GIF Construction Set Professional first boots up, it will probably complain about being unable to find Windows Paint. This is normal — the default installation of Wine doesn't include Windows' ancillary applications such as Paint, and as such you wouldn't expect GIF Construction Set to be able to find it. We'll address this one in a moment.

Pretty much everything in GIF Construction Set will work, with the following exceptions.

1. The Movie import and export functions are a tad obstreperous. As of this writing, the AVI codec support in Wine seems to be broken, and attempts to save an animation to AVI will fail. Attempting to select a different video codec crashes GIF Construction Set. As these are Wine issues rather than GIF Construction Set issues, we can do little but wait for the development people behind Wine to address them. You can save animations to AVI if you disable the Write Compressed Movies item in the GIF Construction Set Profesisonal Setup dialog. The MOV functions should work if you install QuickTime for Windows.
2. The Paint function in the Image block edit window won't work, as GIF Construction Set couldn't find a Paint application.
   
   

Also, note that the Help menu may appear at the extreme right end of the GIF Construction Set menu bar under Wine.

By default, Wine will present applications running under it with two lettered drives. Drive C is the top of the Windows folder structure — that is, the contents of the .wine\drive_c hidden folder in your home folder. Drive Z is the top of your Macintosh folder structure. If you want to work on animations stored somewhere on your hard drive that's not under your .wine folder, you'll need to select drive Z.

If you open the Configure Wine item in the WineHelper menu of WineHelper, you can fine-tune some of Wine's stealthier aspects. You can, for example, assign additional drive letters for use under Wine's simulation of Windows. This can save a fair bit of rodent action if you keep all your graphics in a particular folder which you'll want to open quickly from within GIF Construction Set.

The lack of Windows Paint under OS X is a problem for GIF Construction Set, and it's one that can't be resolved without a bit of stealth. To the best of our knowledge, Microsoft's web page does not include a downloadable installer for Windows Paint.

There are several ways to address this:

• If you don't actually need the Paint facility under GIF Construction Set, disable the Search for Paintbrush item in the Display tab of the GIF Construction Set setup dialog. This will disable the search each time GIF Construction Set starts up.
• If you have access to a Windows XP installation, you can borrow Windows Paint, to be described in a moment
• You can install another Windows paint application under Wine and configure GIF Construction Set to use it whenever you click on Paint, as discussed in the GIF Construction Set Reference document in the Manual. Click on the ? button in the GIF Construction Set tool bar. Being mercenary capitalist swine, we'd suggest our e-Paint software.
  
  

To borrow Windows Paint from Windows XP:

1. Locate MSPAINT.EXE, MSPAINT.HLP and MSPAINT.CHM on your Windows system's hard drive — they can usually be found in the c:\i386 folder. Don't use the MSPAINT.EXE file in C:\windows\system32
2. Copy these files to a flash drive or a floppy, or otherwise move them to your Macintosh environment.
3. Turn your attention to your Macintosh system. Use a Finder window to navigate to your Wine folder structure. In the drive_c\Program Files folder, create a sub-folder therein called Accessories.
4. Drag these three files to your Accessories folder.
   
   

Windows Paint makes calls to several Windows system libraries that aren't installed with Darwine. You'll need to use Winetricks, to be discussed in a moment, to put these files in place before Paint will work.

You might want to borrow WORDPAD.EXE while you're abstracting the files for Windows Paint — it's handy for opening simple Windows DOC files.

Keep in mind that the foregoing files are part of Windows, and you should have a license for Windows to use them.

We tried this with Paint from Windows 98 as well, and it also ran under Wine.

You can install the current Alchemy Mindworks animation plugins under GIF Construction Set running on a Macintosh... and they'll largely work, too. As you might expect, this statement comes with a few qualifiers:

• When you first open a plugin, a blank window may appear and flash for a second or two. This appears to be a Wine issue. It's harmless.
• Wine comes with a limited and slightly odd palette of fonts, and these are the only fonts that will be available to those plugins that get involved with text. You'll need to select an initial font in the Font combo boxes for these plugins before any example graphics will appear. It's a really good idea to use Winetricks, to be discussed in a moment, to install the Windows core fonts before you use any of the animation plugins.
• The 3D Effects #1 plugin, which relies on Windows' implementation of OpenGL, is a cat in a blender as of this writing — don't go there. It might get better as Wine improves.
  
  

Wine installs with just enough simulated Windows to perform the basic functions of the Windows software environment. It lacks a number of the resources that real-world Windows software likes to have available — and that includes most of the Alchemy Mindworks applications.

There's a third-party script by Dan Kegel called Winetricks that will automatically install many of the things Wine lacks, all without requiring that you search the Internet for files and then figure out where to put them in your Wine directory structure. Winetricks is only slightly more complicated to use than a toothpick, and no trees were cut down to make it.

To use Winetricks, you'll need to download it and run it, tasks unlikely to tax the mind of a liberal politician — much — and they can be performed whilst deep in a coma for the rest of us. There's a special build of Winetricks available for Darwine, called TRiX, which includes the Winetricks script and some ancillary bits you'll need to use it on a Macintosh. Download it and double-click on it to extract it to your desktop. Double-click on the TRiX icon to open the Winetricks user interface.

There are four panels of options in the TRiX script as of this writing. Enable the items you want to have installed under Wine and then click on Install. The Winetricks script will fetch the files you need from Microsoft's servers. You'll probably have to work through a number of Microsoft's installers as it proceeds. If you actually try to read all the end user license agreements presented therein, your head will explode — don't say you haven't been warned.

At a minimum, you should have Winetricks install the following items:

• MS Courier, Arial, Times fonts
• MS Tahoma font (not part of corefonts)
• All the audio and video codecs
• The standard RGB color profile
• Native common controls
• vc6redist from VS6sp4
• All the Visual C++ redistributables
• mfc40
  
  

You can find more about Winetricks at the Wine web page.

The following are the current Alchemy Mindworks applications and plugins, and their likelihood of getting along with Wine. This list pertains to the current releases of our software — many earlier editions were not huge fans of Wine.

The reality of running Windows software on a Macintosh is that not everything Windows does, and hence Windows software expects, is available in the environment of Wine, or works absolutely as it does under Windows. The differences are slight, the issues are trivial... but this is more than enough reason for software to misbehave. Software lives for opportunities like this.

The foregoing represent our tests of our products under Wine, and should not be interpreted as an assurance or guarantee that they'll work for you. Please be sure to test the evaluation copies of the applications you're interested in on your Macintosh before you register them.

In running Alchemy Mindworks software under Wine, it's important to keep in mind that you'll be using it in an environment for which it was not designed. Wine is a well-written Windows simulation, and its developers appear to be striving to improve it. None the less, the possibility remains that some of the functionality of our applications may not work correctly under Wine.

Unless you encounter a genuine software bug in our products, these issues pretty much always arise from a not-quite-perfect Windows-like environment, that is, Wine is still experiencing a few growing pains. For the most part, we're unable to provide assistance with Wine-related issues pertaining to our software.

We urge you to evaluate our products thoroughly if you intend to run them under Wine, and make sure that they'll do what you expect of them. Not to put too fine a point on it, if you register Alchemy Mindworks software and then decide that it doesn't get along with Wine, you're sunk.

You can always spot the pioneers... they're the ones with the arrows in their backs.