Welcome to Fractal Forums

Hi Guys,
This is to try to help all those people who are trying to run fractal software on the Mac that was originally written for the PC.
There are so many people who seem to have run into trouble doing this that I wanted to share my experience.
I do not speak from anything other than my own actual experience. I do not have any affiliation with any software manufacturers at all.
I have been a Mac user for many years. I have also used PC's on and off for about the same length of time. This is what I have found when trying to run Mandelbulb 3D and a few other fractal programs on the Mac.

Don't do this;
Don't use the Mac "software ports" of PC programs. they don't work right. the programmers don't know how to plug the program into the Mac OS properly so you get a kind of broken version of the windows file system in the open and save dialogs, it can make your programs and files very hard or impossible to find. Also they get very slow and clunky to use, and they tend to crash a lot. This is not a good solution.
Don't use the Apple program "Boot Camp". you have to make a separate hard drive partition for it and re-boot into it whenever you want to use it. This quickly becomes a pain in the watsit, and it practical use it isn't that great either, you can't get into your regular Mac programs from it.
Don't use a "Software wrapper" to make the PC version work in the Mac OS. They are a pain to set up and you still get a lot of the file window problems that you get with the PC port-overs. And you have to do it for each program you want to use. And it's a bit of a headache trying to solve all the little niggley problems that people always seem to get doing this.

The best and least painful solution I have found is to buy a PC emulator that will run Windows on a Mac computer.
After a bit of research I purchased the program "Parallels Desktop" and a copy of Windows. "Parallels Desktop" does not need a separate hard drive partition to work. It installs just like any regular software and runs alongside your Mac programs fine.
There are other PC emulators for the Mac, but "Parallels Desktop" is the one that I chose, I have no experience of the others.
I have found this program to be stable and reliable. it works fast, there does not seem to be much at all in the way of "emulator overheads" that slows it down. It has never crashed and it has run all of the Windows programs that I have put onto it with no problem. I usually render my pictures in Maldelbulb 3D at 2500 X 3500 pixels and it renders that in about five to fifteen minutes.
This solution is the best one that I have come across. It will get you working, and making fractals more quickly and more reliably than any of the other "cheaper" ways. The best part is that it makes all the pain go away... It just works.

all the best guys
have fun (for the longest time I forgot to do this...) :tease:
D

I beg to differ about the speed of Parallels - for CPU/FPU based software a slowdown of 20% or more compared to native Windows is usual - not so much for GLSL/OpenCL/CUDA though.

Personally I use Crossover, which is the commercial release of Wine and the speed hit compared to Windows native is usually around 1% to 5% and never worse than 10%. Though admittedly there are sometimes issues with menus and often the help systems.

Other benefits of Crossover are that many Windows games will run essentially at full speed on your Mac using it - including Oblivion and Skyrim (at least the Steam version of Skyrim anyway).

Also there are none of the mentioned problems running the Mac port of Ultra Fractal - I was a beta-tester on both Snow Leopard and Lion - in fact I have some problems with the Windows version running on WinXP through Bootcamp that don't occur when running the native Mac version.
But we're still waiting for the full animation version on Mac ;)

I personally use Wineskin Winery and create a wrapper for each program i wish to use. To be fair it can be a pain, but once you know what your doing it's pretty quick and easy. I never had any problems with them apart from very occasionally having to use the wineskin.app to 'kill all wineskin processes' which can hang and prevent the main app from opening. Apart from that it seems fine. I currently run Apophysis7x 15D, Mandelbulb3d,  Dawn of War (game) and was previously running Borderlands (Pretty hefty game) with no issues. I'm not discounting you experience, just providing mine too.