Mac Pro 1,1 - MacPhun Luminar

[nexus_rumor]

Hi everyone,

Just a question for all of you old-school Mac Pro 1,1 owners: have you had any problems with running certain software on your venerable beast? I'm running 10.11.6, using the wonderful Pike 64- to 32-bit thunking hack, and I've never had a problem before, until now...

As you might have guessed from the title, I've been having issues with the Luminar application (it's a MacPhun product). I installed it, and it was working as a stand-alone application, but the Photos extension wouldn't work. So I contacted their support, and we went through the usual "delete the app using AppCleaner, reinstall it, etc etc". At that point the Photos extension still didn't work, but unfortunately I couldn't even load a photo without it crashing too.

So I've actually gone backwards since I contacted their support team. Now the software is basically unusable to me.

To make matters worse, during one of the later emails, they asked for a screen shot of "About My Mac", which I duly provided. They then said (the paraphrasing is mine), "Oh, bad luck, your Mac is too old and we don't support it. Our shiny new application is too futuristic." Erm, as much as I tried to tell them that no other software has had a problem, and that it was working better previously, they have essentially blanked me.

Has anyone heard of this before? It doesn't seem reasonable to me, given what I know of the thunking hack, but I'd like to canvas other opinions.

(I have Crash Report files, but I don't know how to read them, if it would help. Perhaps I could also post the email exchange if it would be useful.)

Thanks in advance!

 

[Flint Ironstag]

Expect more of this as time goes on. At some point you'll have to freeze your OS and app versions. You have a Carbon Copy Cloner bootable backup of the last known good configuration, right? Right?

 

[nexus_rumor]

Well, now that you mention it, no actually. Perhaps TM could provide something useful if I wanted to look, but it wasn't really working anyway.

Why do you think I should expect more of this, other than the fact that El Cap is the last version? It's been 11 years now, sure, but there's never been a problem before. Do you have an idea why it would be a problem now?

 

[FireArse]

I have a Mac Pro 2006 running 10.11.6 with the ATI 7950. I've not come across an issue like this - if the software app supports 10.11.6, I've found the app to run fine on my hardware.

I would suggest using one of the drive bays to install a fresh copy of 10.11.6 and then your tool.

Let us know how you progress.

 

[nexus_rumor]

I just wanted to update this after some research.

(I haven't re-installed 10.11 on another disk as suggested above - it's a good idea but just not practical for me at the moment.)

The crash that I'm getting is "illegal instruction: 4".

This link (http://www.luxrender.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=12690), which is very helpful, tells me that it "typically means that a program is compiled with extensions / optimisations ( sse3/4, ave ) the cpu does not have".

This obviously doesn't sound promising, and I must admit, surprises me because I've never had a problem before. But it does gel quite closely with what MacPhun are saying, so it seems that humble pie might be on the menu tonight. That link above also seems to describe a very similar problem that I'm having, and even mentions Mac Pro 1,1 and 2,1 machines.

(There are other links that are also thrown up with problems related to older cpus e.g. this one from MacPorts also details similar problems: https://trac.macports.org/ticket/51097.)

Macphun do note that their software will only run with "Core 2 Duo from late 2009 or newer" processors. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Vector_Extensions) notes that AVX switches only appear to be valid on Sandy Bridge or later, from 2011 apparently. But MacPhun will run on Core 2 Duo from 2009. So it's not clear which of the switches are causing the problem i.e. maybe it's one of the SSE switches instead of AVX.

But basically, unless I can somehow convince Macphun to add in some code to check for older (unsupported) machines, and switch off the applicable optimisations, then it's not going to work. I imagine that the chances of them doing that, for an edge-case machine like this, with a newly developed software suite, are close to zero.

Anyway, someone might find this interesting for future reference.