Note: This information applies to versions of ANY-maze prior to version 7.50. ANY-maze version 7.50 and later will not run on Parallels.

ANY-maze is designed to run on a Windows PC. However, you can run it under Windows on an Apple Mac, using Parallels, which creates a ‘virtual machine’ to run it in. We don’t officially support this, and there are some known issues with doing so. In fact, ANY-maze will display a message at startup warning you about the potential problems.

The biggest problem comes under the following conditions:

  1. You have your ANY-maze experiment files stored in the Mac filesystem (e.g., Macintosh HD > Users > [username] > Desktop) rather than the Windows filesystem (e.g., C:\Users\[username]\Desktop).
  2. You load an experiment file that was originally saved in an earlier version of the ANY-maze software.

Under these conditions, ANY-maze will attempt to convert the file to work with the newer version of the software, but the file will become corrupted and no longer usable.

The simplest way to avoid this problem is not to try to use ANY-maze files directly from your Mac filesystem, but to copy the files into the filesystem of the Windows Virtual machine (for example, Windows’ “Documents\ANY-maze” folder, which is where ANY-maze looks for experiment files by default).

If you’ve already got a file that was stored on the Mac filesystem, and it has become corrupted as described above, it should be possible to recover your data as follows:

  1. Use the Windows File Explorer to open the folder containing the corrupted experiment file.
  2. Within this folder there may be several copies of the file in question – for example: “My experiment.szd”, “My experiment – backup 1.szk”, “My experiment [Before conversion].szd”
  3. Rename the first of these files (the file that has become corrupted) to something like “My experiment (corrupted).szd”. You’ll probably be able to delete this later; for now, you’re just renaming it as a backup copy.
  4. Rename the last of these files (“… [Before conversion].szd”) to give it the original experiment’s name (i.e., “My experiment.szd”).
  5. Move this file into a folder on the Windows filesystem of the virtual machine that Windows is running in.

Once the file is on the Windows filesystem, within the Windows virtual machine, you can then load it into ANY-maze. This will convert the file on the Windows virtual machine’s filesystem, and should convert the file correctly. Once you’ve done this, you can delete the corrupted file which you renamed in step 2 above, as it’s no longer needed.

If you’d like more help with this, or the instructions above aren’t clear, then just contact ANY-maze support ([email protected]) for further assistance.

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