The Emerald ECU mapping software is Windows only & I've gone Apple Mac at home for some years now; I work with Windows boxes all day and I just find the OSX/Apple platform easier to work with for most tasks.
The challenge was to get the ECU software running under emulation.
Virtualbox
I'm using Oracle Virtualbox which allows multiple operating systems and installed my copy of Windows XP on it.
I already have a Prolific USB to Serial Adaptor which can be coaxed into working directly with Virtualbox and the host operating system.
Install the prolific drivers on both the Mac & Virtual OS;
The trick (& the bit that took most time to solve by copious googling) is to add a USB filter to VirtualBox which only looks for the vendor ID. Connect the adaptor to the Mac & add it to the ports->USB->filters section. Then edit to remove all the values except Name & Vendor ID. This lets VirtualBox take control of the adaptor and present a COM port to Windows:
Final test today was to connect up to the ECU and check it all runs; no issues at all - at last I have decent laptop battery life with the MacBook & can easily swap between the Emerald software on XP & the rest of my stuff on OSX.
I have also setup a folder share so the Windows machine is actually loading & saving the Maps back to my Mac O/S directly:
Funny thing - Windows stresses me out something rotten; its just too associated in my mind with configuration/drivers/fiddling about rather than just getting the job done.
No idea why I never tried this before Wine is available on OSX and Emerald's ECU software appears to run fine. That is even easier than spinning up a windows emulation layer.
Mapping the USB to serial adaptor requires the drivers install on OSX (as above) then a symlink setup into wine thus so it appears as COM3 to Emerald.
Symlink command: ln -s /dev/tty.usbserial ~/.wine/dosdevices/com3
Wine
Update Feb 2018No idea why I never tried this before Wine is available on OSX and Emerald's ECU software appears to run fine. That is even easier than spinning up a windows emulation layer.
Mapping the USB to serial adaptor requires the drivers install on OSX (as above) then a symlink setup into wine thus so it appears as COM3 to Emerald.
Symlink command: ln -s /dev/tty.usbserial ~/.wine/dosdevices/com3
There is a bug/feature - when loading maps or any files, I need to click on a different map first, then back to the one I want to force the software to load in the preview map names before loading. Probably some sort of Wine bug/workaround.
