VirtualAcorn Technical support:
Mac OS X products

This page contains links to technical articles about VirtualAcorn products. Please note that using any of the information contained in these articles is done so entirely at the users own risk. These articles will assume a reasonable level of technical expertise in both RISC OS and Mac OS X. Failure to follow instructions in an article accurately could cause your VirtualAcorn product to cease functioning correctly.

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Search the VirtualAcorn website

If you need help with a particular problem then the following search (provided by Google) may well help. This will search the VirtualAcorn website as well as the VirtualAcorn Forums for any key words that you enter. Try and keep your search terms simple. For example type "Sibelius" rather than "How do I install Sibelius in my copy of VirtualRPC".

The Technical Support Assistant for Mac OS X (Beta)

The Technical Support Assistant can help you diagnose and solve a number of common problems. Since we are only open during normal office hours (10:00am to 4:00pm Monday to Friday) there can be a delay in you getting a response to a support e-mail that you have sent us. The Technical Support Assistant asks the same questions we would ask over the phone, or via e-mail, in order to find the problem and suggest possible solutions. Experience so far suggests that this is an effective and quick way of solving some problems, especially out of office hours.

VirtualAcorn for Mac OS X - Support articles

Mac OS X 10.15 (Catalina) and later

• Running VirtualRPC on a 64 bit only Mac (OS X 10.15 or later)

Technical information about VirtualAcorn products

• Description of the VirtualAcorn configuration files
• Recovering a "lost" unlock code

Installation

• Moving a complete VirtualRPC installation to a different Mac
• Installing VirtualRPC on a Mac with no optical (CD/DVD/Bluray) drive

Installation problems

• VirtualRPC installers report an error and then close

Licencing and support policies

• Gifting or selling your VirtualRPC to a third party (updated 26/05/18)
• Technical support policies some bad examples (updated 05/12/19)

Floppy discs and drives

• Workround for reading Acorn format floppy discs
• Using an external USB floppy drive to read DOS format discs
• Reading .adf (Acorn Disc Format) floppy disc image files.
• Using ShareFS to add a Virtual Floppy Drive

VirtualAcorn Harddiscs

• Altering the capacity of ADFS hard disc images
• Renaming HostFS::HardDisc4
• Recovering files from a RISC OS format hard disc

Optical discs and drives

• Reading RISC OS format CDs without using an optical (CD/DVD/Bluray) drive

Keyboard and Mouse

• RISC OS Function Keys
• Centre (MENU) mouse clicks not working with the Apple Magic Mouse

Software problems

• Problems running software on VirtualAcorn

Printing problems

• Print jobs don't appear from the printer

Running a Windows VirtualAcorn on an Intel Mac

• Using VirtualAcorn with BootCamp or Parallels