EViews.com

I tried an evaluation version of Eviews 6 on Crossover Mac (based on DarWine - allows me to run windows programs on my Mac OSX) but an error came up saying something to the effect of "your machine code does not match the registration code".

I read in the thread "Macintosh" that you can run Eviews on VMware Fusion but you have to get it remotely activated. Is this because of a similar machine code problem like the one mentioned above (since Windows is being emulated)? If it is, could I get Eviews activated on Crossover Mac if I bought it? I'd rather not buy VMware Fusion if possible as its rather expensive and I already have Crossover.

Finally, would life be a lot easier if I just run it on Bootcamp?

Thanks in advance.

Hong:

We've done some internal testing with running EViews on Crossover Mac and there are some problems with it. Some of our graphical drawing is done using Windows GDI which is not yet supported fully on Crossover. Also, our license protection code requires some native resources that Crossover does not emulate properly, which prevents you from ever being able to register EViews with your Mac. Thus, the only way to get EViews running on CrossOver (in a limited capacity because of the drawing issues) is for us to issue you a completely license free version of EViews, which we cannot do for obvious reasons.

VMware Fusion or Parallels is a much better option. Both of these programs have an option which allows you to run EViews and make it look like it's running on OSX, without the need of a Windows desktop background.

We usually don't allow our Windows users to install EViews on a virtual machine because of licensing concerns, but we make an exception for Mac users because we don't have a Mac specific version (yet). After you purchase a copy of EViews, you'll need to contact us to request this exception for your serial number and we can turn on some flags to allow you to install it on your VM.

Boot Camp with Windows installed will work without any issues and will not require a VM allowed serial number. But you'll have to reboot to Windows everytime you'll want to use EViews which can be very inconvenient for most users.

Steve

As a long suffering user of EViews and Crossover, my response would be that CrossOver is simply unusable. It is buggy and does not support many software other than the most prominent ones.

My advice would be to switch to the many fully supported Mac based software packages such as R (www.r-project.org), Stata, Ox Metrics and Gauss and simply abandon EViews which seem to have a very restrictive licensing policy even for legitimate license fee payers.

While we would certainly encourage you to use whatever software best suits your needs, I think that for many of our users it would be hard to replicate the experience that EViews provides within another package.

Unfortunately, the same features that make us appealing to many users (a highly interactive graphical interface, extensive integration with Windows) make it relatively hard for us to be ported to other operating systems.

EViews does run fairly well under virtual machines such as Parallels and VMWare, but the emulation layer systems such as Crossover tend to be incomplete in ways that cause us problems.

To be honest, we just haven't had enough demand for a Mac specific version of EViews up to this point to justify the investment required to do things properly. We are certainly keeping an eye on things though, and we may yet decide that it is worthwhile to proceed on such a project.

As far as our licensing goes, we certainly try to do all we can to make things as painless as possible for our legitimate users. Unfortunately, virtual machines create many complicated licensing issues that will need to be addressed by the entire software industry in coming years.

From the previous postings one gets the impression that a Mac version of Eviews is under consideration. Could you tell about the status for that project. In the meantime I use Eviews in my econometrics class, where our students buy the student version of Eviews 6 along with the book. Can you also offer the "flag turning" for the student version of Eviews 6.

Thanks in advance

If they contact us individually, and are using one of the supported virtualisation techniques (Fusion, Virtual PC or Parallels), then yes we can turn the flag on for them.