Wolfson Unit Software MAC OS X compliance

This information was last updated on 22nd June 2010.

Q. Can I use my Wolfson programs on a MAC ?
A. The answer to this is yes, provided that a virtual machine and a recent Windows operating system are installed. All Wolfson software has been tested on a MAC machine with MAC OS X 10.6 Leopard installed and Virtual Box 3.2.4 and the programs all appear to function correctly. See our Microsoft compliance pages if Windows Vista or Windows 7 are used as guest system.

If you have any further questions that are not answered in the details below then please contact the Wolfson Unit.

Virtualization tool

All Wolfson software is developed for Windows/PC only but can run on a MAC if a Windows environment is made available. Virtualization tools such as Virtual Box allow one or more unmodified Windows operating systems to run on a MAC machine on top of the existing MAC operating system. Virtual Box is the only general-purpose virtualizer for x86 hardware that is also freely available as Open Source Software. Virtual Box supports PC/Windows operating systems up to Windows 7.

Guest Windows OS

Our trials were conducted using Windows 7 64-bit as a guest operating system. Prior to running any Windows software, a licensed, unmodified version of the guest Windows OS must be installed in the host machine and a predefined amount of disk space must be reserved for it. The Virtual Box user manual will provide information on the OS installation process.

USB filter for hardware lock

The guest OS must detect our USB dongle in order to run the licensed versions of our software. This does not happen by default and requires setting up a USB filter for the dongle from the Settings panel of Virtual Box, where the dongle is normally listed as ‘Softlok USB key’. The procedure is described in the Virtual Box user manual.