VMware Fusion for Mac and SongShow Plus

There are a few options for running SongShow Plus in a Mac environment - one of them is VMware Fusion.

VMware Fusion is a virtual machine implementation designed specifically for the Mac platform.   Unlike BootCamp, VMware Fusion does not require system reboots and the user can interact with both the Mac (Host) and Windows (Guest) operating systems at the same time.  A Windows license is required and there may be some performance hit. Visit the VMware website for more information.

We have tested the latest version of Fusion (2.0.1) on a MacBook Pro and it appears to function better than our previous attempt but is still not fully functional with regard to SongShow Plus.  Here is what we found... 

What Does Work:

• Multi-monitor in SSP - It appears that the multi-monitor functions as expected.  I did find that the Host OS (Mac) has to be set for multi-monitor before the Guest OS (Windows) will properly do multi-monitor display.
• Basic SSP license functions - It appears that the features available with the Basic SSP license such as Song display, Scriptures and 2D transitions are working although exhaustive testing was not performed.

What Does Not Work:

• DirectX9 functions - DirectX functionality within SSP is not working.  It is not possible to enable the High-end Graphics features.  Without the ability to enable High-end Graphics we are unable to test any of the advanced features such as Realtime Video Effects, CinFX and 3D Transitions/Animations.

There is still a question of performance using SSP in this method but without DirectX working fully that is hard to gauge.  We will continue to test this as new information and/or builds become available and update this article as appropriate. 

Feel free to post in the forums if you have specific feedback on any testing you may have done with VMware Fusion and SSP - good or bad - so we may update this article.

(SW21)