[MacOS] LDCad on Wine (for Mac)-revisited

[Manfred Kern]

Following the original thread, I want to revisit this topic as I'm working on a how-to guide for using LDCad (and other LDraw utilities) under Wine. I would love to know what experiences some of you have had.

Here's what I have successfully running:

• OS 10.14.6 Mojave on a 2012 Intel MacBook
  
• Wine (stable) 4.0.3
  
• XQuartz 2.7.9 (required dependency)
  

Here's what works:

• LDCad (flawlessly)
  
• LDDP (good, one minor window management issue)
  
• DATHeader (fine, a little jaggy-looking)
  
• Img4Dat (usable, some wonky GUI issues)
  
• LD Pattern Creator (seems fine, but I really haven't tested it)
  
• MPDCenter (fairly good, also jaggy-looking, glitchy in general)
  
• LDView (nope, it doesn't render anything in the viewport)
  

Also, in general any polling between external programs doesn't seem to work, but maybe I just don't know how to set it up.

I did have to manually place the fonts FreeSans and FreeMono into my drive_c\windows\Fonts folder for LDCad (as previously reported).

I just did some tinkering to see if I could update anything, but to be honest any newer configuration than the one I have seems to break something. You cannot use XQuartz 2.7.11 because it results in ugly, chunky fonts, and the current XQuartz 2.8.0 just pain doesn't work at all. (I believe there is a fix in the works for 2.8.1, though.)

I tried upgrading to Wine 5.0, but it results in a minor but annoying issue with LDCad, where the app window acts like it isn't in the front after desktop switching (even though it is). Sounds trivial, but desktop switching is such a big part of my workflow that it becomes quite irritating. So I reverted to 4.0.3, the previous stable release. (Installer packages aren't out yet for Wine 6.0.)

I would very much like to know if anyone has had success with any newer configuration? Specifically, has anybody tried Catalina or Big Sur with Wine yet? Official Wine doesn't support them, but CrossOver (paid Wine) reputedly does. But then, I don't know if it has the same issues as newer versions of Wine—and if so, whether they're fixable.

I don't want to disappoint you, but since MacOS 10.15 (Catalina) 32bit is no longer supported. So, Wine will not run (at least for 32 bit programs). So whatever you do, will either be temporary or will not work at all.
What I found is https://github.com/Gcenx/WineskinServer. I do not know if this really helps.

Currently, if you want an LDraw editor, the only ones running out of the box is LeoCad and Stud.io (to my knowledge).
Bricksmith has problems with OpenGL on MacOS (Apple changed something under the hood). If you can compile the version from GitHub, I think it will work (at least on my MacOS - Big Sur). They fixed something. But this is not available as a binary from the bricksmith web page.

Another choice is running a Windows version in a virtual box such as Parallels, VMWare or Virtualbox.
I think a no cost option could be VirtualBox (which is free) and Windows. To my knowledge you can use an unregistered Windows 10 version (you will not be able to tweak the look of Windows). From a license perspective I do not know if this is legal, but technically it is working. Well to be honest, Virtualbox is not running on MacOS Big Sur either.

The last option which comes into my mind is using BootCamp if you have enough disc space. Not very comfortable having to reboot only for using LDraw editors.

It is really a sad state. I love Bricksmith because it offers more variety for flexible parts as LeoCad and Stud.io.