To keep it short. URC changed the way their remotes connect/communicate with Windows in 2011. They now connect like a HID device. Like a mouse or keyboard. Previously you needed a driver. I was told by URC that any remotes they made after June 2011 didn't need a specific driver for the operating system. The problem is that I own and a lot of people I know have MX-880 remotes that were made before June 2011 and need a driver. If you are running Windows 8 you won't be able to program your remote. Be careful, URC has no path or resolution for this. They pretty much stopped giving connect support for a remote that is only 2 years old. You will be forced to keep using Windows 7 if you plan to program any remotes older then June 2011. Very lame. I think it is URC's job to provide some kind of support. We are talking about a remote that is years old here, just 20 months here. So, be careful when you upgrade to Windows 8 you may not be able to program any remotes made before that June 2011 date. This of course will keep me away form URC in the future. I hate when companies just abandon people.

I cant program them via OSX either.... Is that URC's fault as well?

Just run XP or Win 7 in a VM and run the software from there. A bit of a pain, sure, but not the end of the world. It's how I manage my MSC-400s that don't work with 64-bit Win 7.

It is your fault if you bought it knowing that it doesn't support it.

My programming computer is a Win XP machine. Rather than battle new product releases I have just been using an OS that just works.

Yes, a pain. It really is too bad URC didn't follow through with a little support and make a driver for their older (not really old here, pre June 2011) remotes. If that is how as a company they operate that's fine. I'll just look elsewhere for a place that keeps things a little better up to date. Asking for a Windows 8 driver is a completely legit request.

Welcome to the world of URC. They couldn't give a crap about existing customers.

Or it could be they lack the know-how to make them work with the new OS.

I have a stack of old laptops for programming specific products or client systems. You should try using smart touch wizard on old st-1500 st-cp systems or a windows 95 laptop that I used to update IR drivers for a AE Monaco system.

Use RTI. No stupid connection issues,ever. With pro control available there's no reason to ever sell URC.

But somehow upgrading the OS on your laptop without checking isnt your fault?

As I recall, the "driver" was nothing more than the ActiveSync driver needed for Windows CE to talk to Windows OS.

Something that Microsoft dropped support for in Windows 8...

+1

... also includes a native serial port!

Jason, can you give me more info on VM setup?
I have NEC DSX system as well as HAI Automation Studio that's giving me crap on my Office PC. I want to find the fix before my trusty Win XP laptop craps out.
Also, would running Virtual Machine also be a 'fix' to UniFi's server issues everyone (including me) is bitching about? Just to clarify, I only care about running UniFi server for configuration; not ongoing, monitoring.  

Again, a peson says "just" and then leaves out lots and lots of details. Or, to say it more nicely,



This has happened before, and when I've seen threads about this kind of thing, there didn't seem to be anybody responding saying "yeah, we knew that." Instead, it seems to be news to everybody. Don't ding someone for doing something without knowing what was not generally known at the time.

Flew out the CA to install a video wall using an XP6 for control. Picked up a new unit at A@#D that morning and couldn't connect to update the firmware. After several hours and multiple tech support calls, I'm informed that it needed to be replaced.

Had to go back to the dist. the next morning and replace. It caused a full day delay in the project.

Never say Never :)

Fair enough Ernie, I'll provide more details. :)

Basically you can run a legacy OS like Windows XP in a virtual machine (VM). You have several options for the VM Hypervisor (the software that runs the VM), including the free Microsoft Virtual PC. Another free one with lots of advanced features is VirtualBox (now owned by Oracle), and you can also consider paid options like VMware Professional.

Also, just to get some terminology straight, the "host" machine is the main machine running an OS natively (e.g. the Windows 8 machine in this discussion). A "guest" machine is a virtual machine running on the host, and you can have multiple guest machines installed and even running at a time. The main limitation to running multiple machines at once is CPU and memory, the latter being most important. You want a minimum of 4GB of RAM and preferably 8GB. RAM is cheap so this usually isn't a big deal, but many older laptops are limited to 4GB RAM.

Anyway, the key feature you need in the Hypervisor is USB support, which all of the above have. What this lets you do is pass control of a particular device from the host machine to the guest machine. This might be the device itself if it is a USB-attached device, or it might be a USB-serial dongle for legacy devices that use serial control. I know USB-serial adapters themselves are a big topic of discussion, but I would just mention that I've had very good luck with adapters that use the Prolific chipset which are very common.

So, the process is quite straight forward. Install the hypervisor, and then create a machine and install the guest OS. I would recommend using XP since pretty much any legacy stuff should work with XP. Also, as an aside, you'll want to run a Windows Update but I would recommend leaving Internet Explorer at version 6 in that machine because that can be handy to have sometimes as well. You sometimes run into older web-controlled devices that don't play nice with the newer browsers.

There is also another option you can use instead of installing the guest OS from scratch, which is to convert an existing physical machine to a virtual machine (referred to as a P2V conversion). This can save a lot of time and can be especially handy if you already have some legacy software installed that you no longer have the installation files for. There are a number of free and paid software packages that do P2V conversions, but which one to choose depends a lot on which hypervisor you choose.

Once you have your guest OS you can install whatever legacy software you need. Then, when you need to connect to a legacy device you use the USB control function in the hypervisor software. How to do this varies with each one but it's usually a simple USB or Devices drop down menu where you will see a list of available devices that you can pass through. One thing to note on this is the device list will probably have one or more "unknown devices", one of which is likely your legacy device. These are unknown to the host OS because it doesn't have a proper driver for it, but once you pass it up to the guest OS it should recognize it. If there are multiple unknown devices there unfortunately isn't any easy way to know which is the right one, you just have to try each one.

Once you have all of this setup you just shutdown or hibernate the virtual machine and start it up only when you need it. I usually just hibernate them since booting a Windows XP VM will take a couple of minutes, unless you have an SSD drive (which I would highly recommend - it makes running VMs and pretty much everything else immensely better). The downside of hibernating is it will consume an extra few gigs since it needs to save all of the guest machine's RAM contents.

Hope that helps.