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Created February 2, 2025 23:07
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Forscan on MacOS Montery with wine/wineskin
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forscan_wine.md

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Forking this for posterity - this is the only thing that worked for me

I can confirm that this works with the following setup:

  • Forscan version 2.3.45
  • Sonoma
  • M3 chip
  • This Adapter
  • 2021 Ford Bronco Big Bend 7 Speed Manual

I tried Parallels but no joy - this tutorial was the only thing that ended up working

FORscan is windows only software. You want to run on a Mac. You can download a big windows VirtualBox image (20 GB), run Boot camp, or pay for something like Parallels ($80) or CrossOver ($60, built on Wine).

Instead you can pay with your time and try to get wine running. Problem: wine development for MacOS seems to have died with Catalina (10.15) dropped any support for 32 bit applications. Also every wine setup tutorial you find for a Mac is tightly coupled to the exact version of Mac/Wine/direction of the wind/ shoe size of the author on the day the tutorial was made and will not work for you. With that said here's what it took for me:

Wineskin

https://github.com/Gcenx/WineskinServer Follow the official instructions which use homebrew

brew install --no-quarantine gcenx/wine/unofficial-wineskin

Wineskin bundles wine + other libraries together into one app that then has one windows executable installed on it. The best info is on their wiki

Create a wineskin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkQj0lZFz6I

  • Open Wineskin Winery
  • Install engine (must be WS11WineCX64Bit) for 64 bit only Mac (> Catalina)
  • Create New Blank Wrapper, I called it FORScan

Install FORscan

  • Open up the new wrapper and Install Software
  • Choose Setup Executable and select FORscan setup exe FORScanSetup2.3.45.release.exe
  • Click Next many times
  • Choose Executable and find FORScan.exe
  • You can now run your FORScan wrapper and FORScan will start in a window, but it can't find the USB OBD dongle yet!

USB/Serial port setup

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41enNl9Vsig This video shows how do it for Wine, but we are doing WineSkin which bundles everything together into an app. Ignore the part about installing xquartz.

  • Link the usb serial device to a COM port in wine
    • The instructions online show doing a symbolic link to ~/.wine/dosdevices
    • But we don't have a ~/.wine/dosdevices it's in the bundled app
    • Find your USB device in ls /dev/tty.usb*, for me it was /dev/tty.usbserial-223010213255
    • Instead of ~/.wine/dosdevices it's going to be ~/Applications/Wineskin/Forscan.app/Contents/Resources/dosdevices/
    • ln -s /dev/tty.usbserial-223010213255 ~/Applications/Wineskin/Forscan.app/Contents/Resources/dosdevices/com1
  • Edit the wine registry to tell it about the new COM port
    • Again the instructions tell you to modify ~/.wine/system.reg but we don't have that in our Wineskin wrapper
    • Get to the Wineskin Advanced menu again: right click on your FORScan bundle and Show Package Contents
    • Inside there's another app called Wineskin, open it
    • Advanced -> Tools -> Registry Editor (regedit)
    • Inside the registry editor:
    • HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/Software/Wine/Ports make a new String called COM1 with value of your USB serial port (for me /dev/tty.usbserial-223010213255)
  • Close and go back to your FORScan bundled app again and launch FORScan
  • Now when you go to settings, connection there is a COM1 in there!
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