There is a problem that normally leads to ‘System font could not be loaded!’ when starting the first time. This is because the system font is copied to the place where PM expects it, after PM tries to load it from that position
But that it’s not working when you start it the second time, tells me that this copy operation also did not work.
Do you have a folder like c:\users<your username>\documents\Pro Motion NG - beta ?
It’s strange that you don’t get the dialog of the crash handler that’s included
What happens exactly when it crashes? Do you get any error message? Or is it getting stuck? Or does the program just close?
As for the UI scaling I need to explain what happens.
With V8 I support true UI scaling (if set up correctly). But the UI scaling stuff is a hassle in Windows (and the dev system I use), although it improved the last years.
V7 has a definition within its executable that tells Windows that it does not support UI scaling and Windows should handle this on it’s own. By default Windows then uses a bi-linear upscaling. That means, every UI window element is scaled up making it slightly blurry. You should have that effect.
With V8 the executable says: "hey, my UI can basically be scaled, please use ‘per monitor scaling V2’ ".
“Per monitor scaling V2” is the most recent scaling method and means: when you have different monitors with different scaling settings and you move windows of the application between them, its contents will be renewed/resized with the scaling set up for the respective monitor.
Scaling means that the elements are actually drawn larger, using larger fonts, etc. . The dev system I use has some flaws there, but they don’t really matter, they are minor as far as I could test.
Now, what’s the problem?
The problem is that yet I didn’t trust the scaling and also wanted to give options. So, although the executable says: I’m scalable (which is required to use scaling options at all), I switch scaling off by default when starting the application, or, more precisely: it switches to the setting the user picked and “no scaling” is the default (at the moment). That’s why it’s unscaled on your system. But this is buggy with some systems (although it works on mine):
Checkboxes are upscaled, and some text is, too (e.g. the news pane), although I said: don’t scale. This happens on my new Windows 11 test system as well.
The bi-linear scaling (when explicitly set up) also does not work on my Win 11. It stops drawing some windows, leaves artifacts on screen etc. .
To make a long story short on this… if you wouldn’t face the crash then you could go to the preferences and set up “high DPI scaling” and everything would be fine.
Since my way to offer different scaling options is not working (on all systems) I will deactivate that and so UI scaling will always be enabled. It will of course only scale anything if the Windows display settings are set up to scale larger than 100%. Then the user would not need to change anything in the prefs but you also would not be able to use the type of scaling (bi-linear) that PM V7 used as described above.
It’s a pity that I face these problems so close before the V8 release, but I hope that the scaling will work as expected. Let’s see.
Of course all this is nothing a user should be bothered with, but I wanted to explain the effects that you have with the tiny UI elements.
The bigger problem is the crash behavior and I hope that we can find the reason. I don’t think that this a problem specific to Parallels only. It might also happen on “true” Windows machines.
Thanks for your support!
By the way… you also commented here: Feedback on new PMNG beta (64 bits) on MacOS M1 (Monterey)
Would it also be possible for you to try out Wine and running PM with that? Although it starts with bright UI skin you should be able to switch to “dark mode” in the prefs. The dark mode did not work well in the past, but I did not do any checks on that with V8 and the most recent Wine versions. (I don’t have a Mac myself, actually )