Mastercam on a Mac

[Curtis Hesselgrave C&M Engineering]

My current Vaio laptop is getting long in the tooth and I am considering a Macbook Pro. I bought a seat of XP before the end on June in anticipation of a new box.

 

Does anyone have any experience running Mastercam on the Macbook Pro running XP?

[Guest]

Welcome to the Forum

 

 

I can't speak to it directly as I do not run like this, there are at least a couple of members here that have tinkered, somewhat successfully I guess.

 

The biggest thing to consider from my point of view, is support. That would at this time be an unsupported platform, so if you did have troubles you might find it a little harder to get support.

 

Something to consider

[Colin Gilchrist]

Even running XP on the mac, it will perform about 40% faster than a top of the line PC.

 

This is from one of the developers that works at CNC Software. He actually takes his code home and compiles Mastercam on his Mac because it is so much faster...

 

JP is correct about it being un-supported on a Mac, but it is supported on XP...

 

The real question in my mind is "how good are you with computers in general"?

 

If you love technology and don't mind having to tinker, it's a great option. If you don't, this might not be the best route for you...

[Curtis Hesselgrave C&M Engineering]

I'm a moderate tinkerer.

 

I like the idea of being on a platform that is moving forward and is not burdened by Vista being one or two iterations away from being finished.

 

I would run Mastercam only on XP.

[Colin Gilchrist]

Should be perfectly do-able then. If it were my dollar, I would seriously be considering a Mac...

[Michael Sullivan]

I have installed Mastercam X2 MR2 on a Macbook pro and it worked great.

I have not done any extensive benchmark testing yet to compare performance but my work box sucks so it's no contest there!

 

The only testing I did was some basic modeling and toolpathing. No issues to report here. I would like to do more testing though.....just not enough time in the day.

 

I should add that I tried Dual boot XP with Bootcamp and Parallels desktop and they both worked well with Mastercam.

[George Gerhard]

I am running X2 and V9 on my Imac with the 24 inch screen. No problems.

rgds

George

[Colin Gilchrist]

Wow,

 

You even got V9 to run? That's cool. I was more worried about V9 on the Mac XP version...

 

Good to know. Makes getting a Mac even more tempting...

[dvaliket]

Are you saying you are still using or want to use V9 Colin? :-)

[YoDoug®]

Colin teh closet V9 user

[Colin Gilchrist]

I still use V9 for the math routines in the post. Some of the stuff you can do with the version 9 post and interface is easier. You can run a post with out having any operations for example.

 

John Summers has been kind enough to show me some sample post processors that are used to calculate the X and Y data points for Cam profiles. You run the post from inside V9 and it prompts you for a text file that has your distance and angle information, runs a calculation routine inside the post, and outputs an Ascii text file that you can import into Mastercam. It is at this point that I switch over to X3...

 

I don't use V9 for any NC output thankfully. The newer versions keep getting more and more productive.

[Teh Bear without Brains kinda idiot]

I am the great Mac fan .

I have Mac at home and worked on mac for 15 years using it from Macintosh Plus (was v.funny )

But the facts are that here ,in Israel ,Macs are overpriced .

For the equal money I can built Wintel dream machine and run Mastercam .

I can run any system on it ,even MacOS ,but I prefer Linux .

And use MAstercam with XP .

[Tyler Robertson]

Still waiting for that FreeBSD Mastercam build...