After a long and somewhat annoying journey I finally got Solar Fire Deluxe 6 working on OS X without Windows. The first hurdle was getting another copy of the software. I bought Solar Fire a while ago, and when I decided to play with this I discovered that my install CD no longer worked. I proceeded to call Astrolabe, who basically told me they would gladly send me a new CD… provided I coughed up $99 for an upgrade to version 7. This wouldn’t have bothered me much, except that the company that actually WRITES Solar Fire will provide CDs to the rest of the world for ~$35, but not to the US because Astrolabe is the distributor here. The end result was basically that I had to download a pirated copy of software I own so that I could install it. Thank you to Bit Torrent and The Pirate Bay for making this possible.
Once I had a working installer I ran it using CrossOver Pro Mac and it seemed to install fine… until I ran Solar Fire. Solar Fire launched, the splash screen appeared, then the application quit. After a good deal of fiddling around I discovered that Solar Fire requires mfc40.dll. This does not come with CrossOver, but is freely downloadable at a number of places on the web. Once this was installed Solar Fire launches and seems to work fine for the most part. The only issue seems to be a few text fields in the program display in a garbled font (you can see this in the larger version of the photo), but overall everything seems to work.
4 comments
Jorge says:
January 10, 2010 at 7:45 PM (UTC -4)
Hi. Can you access the Preference > Edit Settings menu? Everytime I enter it the program crashes. Is there any clue?
Quaero Lux says:
January 10, 2010 at 8:04 PM (UTC -4)
I actually gave up on using Crossover due to the garbled fonts on the electional search screens. I’ve got a bootcamp partition set up and use VMware Fusion to load Windows on the Mac side.
Jorge says:
January 11, 2010 at 8:16 AM (UTC -4)
just as I thought. I think is too much space wasted to install windows and use VMware…
Quaero Lux says:
July 1, 2009 at 3:57 PM (UTC -4)
I accidentally deleted the comment this was a reply to, the original comment was
“i have the astrofire for windows unfortunately i change my computer for a mac, i want to know if there is a chance to continue using this program with my mac”
by IRMA SOLEDAD MALPICA
Install Boot Camp to create a Windows partition and install Windows. This will let you boot the Mac to Windows and let you install and run your astrology program. You can also buy and install VMware Fusion which will let you run the Windows install from your Boot Camp partition on the Mac without rebooting. It’s what I do now for Solar Fire and Christopher Warnock’s astrology programs.