PCStage

What works

Software installs by unzipping.

All lighting control things seem to work in the GUI.

Sound (mp3) playback works. Volume and panning by dragging the GUI sliders works.

It's possible to get the DMX interface working too (although I haven't tested that it's actually sending anything). See https://github.com/brentr/wine...

What does not

Everything appears to work but the DMX interface requires a FTD2XX shim workaround.

Workarounds

Needed to install a FTD2xx shim into Wine to get the DMX interface working.

Clone https://github.com/brentr/wine... and followed the build/install instructions. Force ARCH=i386 in the Makefile. You'll need build-essential, wine-dev and libftdi1-dev installed too, among other things.

In winecfg, add a DLL override for ftd2xx (builtin) to force it to use the shim rather than a native DLL. Make sure that there are no ftd2xx.dll files available in the DLL path that Wine apps use.

Set the OS version to Windows XP in winecfg since PCStage was originally intended to run on a version around that old. It shouldn't matter if you don't.

In your shell:

export FTDID=EEA0 (your device may have a different USB ID, use lsusb to find it).

wine c:/pcstage-4.7.1/PCStage.exe

In PCStage->Preferences->DMX you should be able to select the USB option if it's working. Your PCLights DMX out LED should light solidly if it worked as expected.

An error "Cannot open USB interface" is still displayed at startup, but this pops up at the same time as a warning about an unimplemented function in the shim so it's probably nothing to worry about - it all seems to work the error is dismissed.

What was not tested

That the DMX interface is actually outputting sensible values or can receive DMX.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Other
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

Giving it a gold rating because, with a bit of prodding, it can be made to work and even talk to its proprietary USB interface. I didn't encounter anything in my not-so-thorough testing that would prevent its use in a production environment. Your mileage may vary.