I need to upgrade my laptop at home. I run ViaCAD Pro v12 on two machines - my iMac at work and my Intel-based Macbook Pro at home. The macbook Pro needs to be replaced due to a broken screen and I want to replace it with another mac laptop. I'm looking at an M2 Macbook Air.

I saw some other posts here about issues with Sonoma/Silicon and ViaCAD 14. But my questions are:


1) Does ViaCAD Pro 12 work at all on newer OS/CPU combos, or does it require an upgrade to 14? I understand it'd be in Rosetta, but that may be ok if it's stable.

2) If I have to upgrade, how stable is ViaCAD 14 under these newer machines? My main concern is with crashes and lockups, which were a major issue for me pre-v12. 12 is quite stable and does everything I need it to do, so I'll only upgrade if I have to.


thanks,

-perry

Thanks. ViaCAD runs under Rosetta, right? If it's memory related that might be it. My understanding is that native apps for Silicon chips use memory somewhat differently, which is why the newer machines have less RAM. I'm still undecided on what I'm getting but I'm coming from the video and film world, where some of our workstations at the office have 128GB of RAM, so I'm used to having more. I'm thinking I'll either get an M2 Macbook Air with 24GB or an M3 Macbook Pro with 18GB.

I ended up ordering an Macbook Pro 14" with M3 Pro 11 core CPU/14 core GPU and 18GB RAM, and I'm picking it up at the apple store on the way home tonight. Once I get the basics transferred over from my old Mac, I'll install ViaCAD 12 and report back. I'm going to hold off on upgrading to 14 until I know I have to for sure, since I'm fine with 12 in terms of functionality right now.

the only two apps I use that aren't native are ViaCAD and the CAM software I use for my CNC router, but I tested that out recently on a friend's Macbook Air -- it worked just fine and is pretty speedy. Fingers crosed ViaCAD just works.

DeskProto - it took some getting used to but my hatred for Autodesk runs deep so it was worth it.

There are some things you can't really do with it that you can do in Fusion360 like threadmilling or adaptive clearing. On the adaptive clearing, there are some strategies you can choose that get you pretty close, and they're going to add some additional features to help manage high chipload cuts a little better soon. the developer is very active on their forum and responsive to change requests. But not having it be tied to the cloud or requiring an internet connection to work, or having to pay a subscription fee was key for me.

MeshCAM is also "no subscription" and crossplatform.
kind regards Danny

MeshCAM still has some bugs but it is better now in v9. I like using MeshCAM a lot.
kind regards
Danny

Edited by user Sunday, January 14, 2024 11:12:33 AM(UTC)  | Reason: added personal opinion

I might take another look at MeshCAM but when I tried it a while back there were a ton of stability issues.

While DeskProto is a bit of an odd interface, I've found that I've been able to do most of what I could do in Fusion360 CAM. It's $250 for the hobbyist license, but even if you bought the commercial license, it's a $1000 one-time payment vs $650/year for Fusion. And who knows what features Autodesk will decide to roll into some other version you have to pay for, or when their cloud might go down when you're in the middle of something?

My main complaints about DeskProto are pretty minor: You can't do arcs in gcode - instead it slices the curve up into lots of small linear movements. But you can specify the "resolution" of these curves and basically you get the same result. The main difference is that instead of a single line telling the controller to do an arc from one point to another, you have many more lines of gcode. Hasn't been a problem for me, but is a little slower to process (curious to see how it does on the new M3 machine though, since that's way faster than my old one). The other thing it can't do right now is stuff like adaptive clearing (though you can get pretty close with some strategies), and thread milling. Other than that, I've found that it's more intuitive than Fusion360, and while it requires a little more thinking about how you go about things, that's probably a good thing in the end.

Doubt they will. They rely on a very clean input file. I always retopo my stl stuff and then convert that model to a stp file.
Estlcam and Ecam v5 are very good for machining.