Hey there!

Has anybody had any luck using Wine (or any program based on it, like PlayOnMac) to run RobotC for Mindstorms on a Unix-based platform? Almost all of our dev team have Macs, and it's a major hindrance to our work to be restricted to working on the odd Windows-based computer that we can get access to.

Thanks so much for your advice!
Cheers,
Alex

You could use VirtualBox on both the Linux and Mac machines and run Windows in there. VMWare Player works very nicely as well, but only on Linux (and Windows).

- Xander

Hi Xander,

Thanks again for the reply. I've considered both of those options (as well as Boot Camp) and the main issue we run in to there is the requirement to purchase lots of expensive Windows licenses, as well as the considerable time cost of starting a virtual machine or rebooting every time someone wants to add a line of code.

Which is why I had high hopes for Wine...although with the advanced USB communication requirements of RobotC I don't know how well that would work out.

Cheers,
Alex

Boot time is negligible if you just suspend the virtual machine, you're talking about 10-20 seconds max.

If your time is free then spending hours upon hours trying to make ROBOTC work in Wine might be an idea, if your time is valuable, then spending a bit of money on a Windows license may not be such a bad investment Cost is very relative.

Alternatively, set up a Windows box and use PC Anywhere or some other form of Terminal Service such as VNC or RDP.

- Xander

I couldn't get Virtual Box to run so well on my Mac, but VMWare Fusion runs no problem. Still going to cost you, but I got a new version of Fusion recently with 20% using 'ws9beta20' but I just checked and it is only valid till Sep 14th. I've been playing with Win 8 and I saw an article the other day that MS will be offering upgrades from as far back as XP for about £40/license. I got my original XP license from ebay, some form of OEM, seemed legit. Still about £70/user though.

Been trying to get RobotC to work, so far I can load the application and create/edit code, but I can't download it onto my robot. I suspect this is because Wine lacks USB driver support. I just write the code on a Mac, then transfer it to a pc to download it when i'm finished.

-Leo

That's the same conclusion that I've come to. The system as we have it now is to just write code wherever, in whatever text editor, and then copy it to a PC and use RobotC to download the code to the NXT brick. Github actually works really well for this sort of collaborative syncing, as we're finding.

-Alex

Question: Why don't you just write the code on the PC since you have one?