I have been struggling quite a bit to get my diving computer – a ScubaPro Galileo Sol – working on my Mac. ScubaPro only produces its SmartTRAK software for Windows. There is a Mac program available called JTrak which runs natively on OS X, but it lacks many of the features of SmartTRAK. Lately, I have been struggling with an easy to configure Wine edition on my Mac called PlayOnMac. It works pretty well with some simple apps I couldn’t find a Mac equivalent for. When I tried it on SmartTRAK however, installation was fine, but actually running the program resulted in a fatal error where the programm was complaining about the Microsoft Jet component which was missing. According to some Wine forums, this could be countered by installing MDAC, but that didn’t solve it. After some more investigation, I found out that you could download a separate Microsoft Jet 4.0 engine from the Microsoft site. Google for “JET 4.0 engine Service Pack 8” and you’ll find what I mean. Installing this into PlayOnMac solved the problem: I can now run SmartTRAK on my Mac (running Mountain Lion). Great stuff!
Next step will be to figure out if I can also get the IrDA USB stick to work via PlayOnMac, so I can actually retrieve the data from my Galileo Sol. Let’s find out…..