This simple program can control digital model railway systems compatible to the 6050-syntax using the serial port of a Mac. Locomotives, function models and accesories. Mac's standard serial port was the RS.422 (8-pin) instead of the PC-world's RS.232 (9-pin). After the release of the first iMac and G3 blue/white this serial port was no longer implemented by Apple. Macs of today have only USB as their standard serial interface. The Digital Interface 6050 / 6051 has its own serial port (DIN 8-pin) and is shipped with a cable RS.232-to-Digital-Interface-6051. Other digital controlling devices (for example the IB) have built in a RS.232 modem-serial port. A connection to the Mac is then possible with a standard Mac-modem-cable.

To make this program work on modern Macs you need an USB-to-serial converter. Keyspan (http://www.keyspan.com/) has developed an USB-to-serial converter (with UniversalBinary driver) which will work under MacOS-X. We recommend to use this one. Of course you can use an older Macintosh with built-in serial ports. The program will even work under MacOS-X 10.2.6 in classic-mode if a serial port is connected to the Mac which is recognized by MacOS 9.2.2 (working example: mini-iDock).

The next hardware you will need is a suitable cable to connect the RS.422 / RS.232 to Digital-Interface 6051. There are several sources on the internet to retrieve informations on how to patch the cable: http://www.heise.de/ct/Redaktion/cm/stack.html - http://members.tripod.com/~Bardioc/Seite13/index-13.html - http://artm-friends.at/rm/train/

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