The zip file got downloaded and automatically extracted to my Downloads folder on macOS
/Users/dannygeurtsen/Downloads/
I then dragged the folder over to my macOS Desktop as that is shared with the Windows 10 VM Desktop inside Parallels. (So you see the exact same content in Windows 10 as you do in macOS Desktop).
/Users/dannygeurtsen/Desktop/
I quite honestly can’t remember if at the time when I first tried the v8 beta (a few weeks ago) there was a ‘fonts’ subfolder.
But is it there now? In the folder where you start PM beta?
When I checked earlier today, there was a fonts folder, but it was empty. So I copied the files over from the fonts folder of my V7.x install. After that, the error went away.
Understood. I just noticed that the patch I sent to you was no beta version. Also I changed folder naming a bit. With beta 11 a different documents sub folder will be used.
When checking beta 11 then please unzip the new version (to your desktop) and run it from there. It should then copy the fonts folder (which may not be empty) properly.
Understood. Will do.
Thanks Jan, for the swift support sorting out these issues today. Much appreciated. 
I’ll keep testing for now.
Thanks for helping me to iron out yet unknown issues 
Hi Jan,
I installed beta 8.0.0.11 and unfortunately we seem to have a regression. It’s back to ‘The System Font could not be loaded!’ error, a non scaled GUI (interface is tiny), as well as a crashing app.
the fonts folder.
I was able to once again solve the missing font error by manually copying over the fonts folder from:
/Users/dannygeurtsen/Documents/Pro\ Motion\ 8/fonts
to
/Users/dannygeurtsen/Documents/Pro\ Motion\ NG\ -\ V8\ -\ beta/fonts
(remember: these are folders on the Macintosh HD partition. Not the Documents folder on C:\ in the Parallels Desktop VM).
Unfortunately the other two problems (non scaled GUI and the crashing) remain.
The v8.0.0.10 beta still runs without crashing.
Side note: the two custom Windows Layouts I had made in v8.0.0.10 do not show up in v8.0.0.11.
Any ideas?
Hi @DutchDimension,
please check if the “fonts” subfolder from the beta-zip that you unpacked contains files, especially the “system-font.bmp” file. On startup this is copied to the “/Users/dannygeurtsen/Documents/Pro\ Motion\ NG\ -\ V8\ -\ beta/fonts” folder on startup.
If it’s missing in the folder where you start pmotion.exe then it can’t be copied and will raise the error.
I assume that you unpacked the beta-zip somewhere and always start pmotion.exe from there which is how it should be.
I’m not sure what really caused the crash with 8.0.0.10 but the patch files I sent were pmotion.exe, pngio.dll and math.dll. I guess pngio.dll was the reason. All files are now included almost the same way in 8.0.0.11. The only difference: they are signed in the public package. Please find the unsigned versions here: Dropbox - patch-bv8-beta11-unsigned.zip - Simplify your life
I can’t imagine that code signing is the reason.
The non scaled UI is also weird, because you had set up the previous version to use high DPI scaling and this setting is stored in the registry. These settings are used by the new beta as well. Same goes for your window layout settings. Furthermore beta 11 uses high DPI scaling as default for when there is no setting in the registry (=new users).
When starting beta 11… did you get this dialog: ?
This would mean that no previous settings where found in the registry which would also be weird, because you used a beta before.
-Jan
P.S.: Did you see a black cat recently? This might be a sign of problems in the Matrix 
Hi Jan,
sorry for the late reply. It’s been a very busy week here.
Just had some time to go over your last comments.
please check if the “fonts” subfolder from the beta-zip that you unpacked contains files, especially the “system-font.bmp” file. On startup this is copied to the “/Users/dannygeurtsen/Documents/Pro\ Motion\ NG\ -\ V8\ -\ beta/fonts” folder on startup.
Okay, I checked the folder and all the files were there. Strangely enough, after rebooting the VM just now, the ‘System font’ error went away.
I assume that you unpacked the beta-zip somewhere and always start pmotion.exe from there which is how it should be.
Yes, that is indeed my process. I unpack the beta zip folders to: /Users/dannygeurtsen/Desktop/
This folder is used by both macOS and the Windows 10 Parallels VM as the Desktop. So it is an easy place to use for interchanging files/folders between the two OS’es.
Please find the unsigned versions here: Dropbox - patch-bv8-beta11-unsigned.zip - Simplify your life
I made a duplicate of the /Users/dannygeurtsen/Desktop/Pro\ Motion\ NG\ Beta\ v8.11 folder and overwrote the the unsigned files in there. It made no difference.
When starting beta 11… did you get this dialog: ?
No I’m not presented this window this time around. I’ve only seen it once or twice since I began testing the v8.x beta.
I did manage to set the app to high DPI mode via the preferences before it crashed.
A few more findings:
The crashing seems to occur only when I start clicking around in the app after startup. If the app starts up and I don’t touch it, it keeps sitting there no problem (with the hints/tips screen open). It’s when I start clicking around that within 5-20 seconds I start seeing the blue ring above the mouse cursor that I mentioned in an earlier post. The ring shows up briefly twice before the app either crashes by simply disappearing immediately, or as it. started doing now, it freezes and after 10-20 seconds it disappears.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that when I tried to create a new project I got the following error.
There are a couple of weird things with that error. First of all, that’s not the file path of the PMotion.exe I was running at that time. That session was running from this folder:
/Users/dannygeurtsen/Desktop/Pro\ Motion\ NG\ Beta\ v8.11\ unsigned
The /palettes folder in there is populated with files. Including the default.pal file in question.
The /palettes folder inside the file path here \Mac\Home\Documents\Pro Motion NG - V8 - beta\palettes (the one printed in the error window) is indeed empty.
But why would the Pro Motion 8.0.0.11 try to look inside a folder belonging to an older version? Isn’t that wrong? So I tried looking around in some of the other Pro Motion folders that were created in that path.
I have the following folders.
\Mac\Home\Documents\Pro Motion 8 
(/folders 
/palettes 
/patterns /samples )
\Mac\Home\Documents\Pro Motion NG (/folders /palettes /pattern /samples )
\Mac\Home\Documents\Pro Motion NG - beta (/folders /palettes /patterns /samples )
\Mac\Home\Documents\Pro Motion NG - V8 - beta (/folders /palettes /patterns /samples )
files inside
no files inside
From this it could be argued that v8 has some problems copying/creating all the necessary files in the \Mac\Home\Documents\ it is creating on first startup.
So I tried copying over the missing palette files from the \Mac\Home\Documents\Pro Motion NG
Unfortunately the crashes persevere.
Also, the previous beta version, 8.0.0.10 remains working well, with the exception of course of the Window Layout bug that you fixed for 8.0.0.11.
I tried all 3 options for GUI scaling by quickly changing the preferences before a crash occurs.It makes no difference on the crashing.
Lastly, I started looking in the Windows Event Viewer to see if I could find some crash logs for you. And I found this. Probably not all that informative by the looks of it, but I figured I’d add it here anyway.
Faulting application name: Pmotion.exe, version: 8.0.0.11, time stamp: 0x63d95b70
Faulting module name: Pmotion.exe, version: 8.0.0.11, time stamp: 0x63d95b70
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x00000000007c612f
Faulting process id: 0x2260
Faulting application start time: 0x01d937dd1a56f6f4
Faulting application path: \Mac\Home\Desktop\Pro Motion NG Beta v8.11 unsigned\Pmotion.exe
Faulting module path: \Mac\Home\Desktop\Pro Motion NG Beta v8.11 unsigned\Pmotion.exe
Report Id: 5bb40ce7-017e-4e48-bae3-d640f342554b
Faulting package full name:
Faulting package-relative application ID:
One last thing, the crashing can almost always immediately be triggered if I switch to another app running on my Mac. Any other running app will do it. Wether I just click on another app’s icon, or wether I CMND+Tab into another app.
Even if I immediately switch back to Pro Motion, Pro Motion will already be in a frozen state… soon to be followed by a hard crash/disappearance.
I find that curious. It makes me wonder if the crashing has to do with GUI drawing calls. And if it is related to the new interface scaling. Because PMNG v7 remains working properly.
Hi @DutchDimension,
okay… need to sort the things and try to describe…
When you start the application from somewhere, e.g.
/Users/dannygeurtsen/Desktop/Pro\ Motion\ NG\ Beta\ v8.11
then it will retrieve the standard Windows “user document folder” which is normally
c:\users\user-name\documents
It will create a folder there matching the version which would be with V8 beta 11:
c:\users\user-name\documents\Pro Motion NG - V8 - beta
It copies some standard files there, e.g. the folders “fonts”, “palettes”, “patterns” from where he pmotion,exe is (app folder) if they are not there.
Later it tries to read the files from there, e.g. …\fonts\system-font.bmp
If the file isn’t there then you get the error message saying that the system font isn’t there. Same happens with palette files when creating a new project etc. .
But if it could not write there on start up then a special error message would appear telling you about the problem and halting the software.
If Parallels gives *\Mac\Home\Documents* as user documents folder right at the start then it should copy the files there, but obviously it doesn’t. Actually there is no difference in that process when compared to V7, which obviously has no problems to copy all the files to its folder \Mac\Home\Documents\Pro Motion NG
The major difference between V7 and V8 is that V7 is a 32Bit application, V8 is 64Bit. But it does not give a sense that this could be the reason. Nevertheless I will check the functions that I use for copying the files if there is anything suspicious.
Can you please copy the files manually from
\Mac\Home\Documents\Pro Motion NG - beta
to
Mac\Home\Documents\Pro Motion NG - V8 - beta
(not sure if you did this already)
and start Beta 11 again?
-Jan
EDIT: I checked the copy operations and did not find anything suspicious 
EDIT 2: I just played around and it turns out that the missing files in \Mac\Home\Documents\Pro Motion NG - V8 - beta are the problem, especially the file project.presets.cfg . If this is missing then an endless loop occurs when creating a new project and this causes a stack overflow which lets the app terminate abnormally. I fixed this now but still the application would not be usable if the files are missing.
Therefore we need to find out why it does not copy the files to Mac\Home\Documents\Pro Motion NG - V8 - beta.
I suggest to remove all these folders:
\Mac\Home\Documents\Pro Motion 8
\Mac\Home\Documents\Pro Motion NG - beta
\Mac\Home\Documents\Pro Motion NG - V8 - beta
→ these folders seem to be those where PM finally reads the files from
/Users/dannygeurtsen/Documents/Pro Motion 8
/Users/dannygeurtsen/Documents/Pro Motion - beta
/Users/dannygeurtsen/Documents/Pro Motion V8 - beta
→ my guess: these folders are there and contain the files that PM writes at startup
When you now start Beta 11 then I guess that
/Users/dannygeurtsen/Documents/Pro Motion V8 - beta
is there with all the files required, but
\Mac\Home\Documents\Pro Motion NG - V8 - beta
is not there or empty.
Can you confirm this? Let’s then go from there.
Okay. I deleted all beta installs and all the folders it creates in both /Users/dannygeurtsen/Documents/ as well as *\Mac\Home\Documents*
and started from scratch.
Installed the latest beta available from the website (beta 11).
This is the result:
/Users/dannygeurtsen/Documents/Pro\ Motion\ NG\ -\ V8\ -\ beta
There are folders inside, but no files except the project.presets.cfg.
\Mac\Home\Documents\Pro Motion NG - V8 - beta
There are folders inside, but no files except the project.presets.cfg.
There is a Pro Motion NG - V8 - beta folder and no files. So basically the same as on the macOS side.
Starting pmotion.exe causes the missing font warning. I get no DPI scaling window. I get the missing palette error (the error window appears twice, so I have to click on the OK button twice, but after this I do get to the ‘Create New Project’ Window)… and the program continues to crash. So no improvement.
Now… I also brought my work laptop in for beta testing duties. This machine is an 2021 M1 16" MacBook Pro running macOS Monterey 12.5.1. I just installed Parallels Desktop 18 on there and created a brand new VM of the latest Windows 11. Here are its results.
/Users/dannygeurtsen/Documents/Pro\ Motion\ NG\ -\ V8\ -\ beta
There are folders inside, but no files except the project.presets.cfg.
(Looks the same as the screen shot of the other machine above)
\Mac\Home\Documents\Pro Motion NG - V8 - beta
There are folders inside, but no files except the project.presets.cfg.
So basically identical to my other Mac running Windows 10 VM.
But starting the pmotion.exe here gives quite a different result:
System font error happens, but the DPI GUI scaling window does appear and allows me to set my choices. App starts up normally. Missing palette error, as expected (the error window appears twice, so I have to click on the OK button twice, but after this I do get to the ‘Create New Project’ Window). However… no crashes so far!! 
Okay, I figured something out about the way that the VM works. It turns out that:
\Mac\Home\Documents\Pro Motion NG - V8 - beta
and
/Users/dannygeurtsen/Documents/Pro\ Motion\ NG\ -\ V8\ -\ beta
Are actually the same folder. (I tried creating files/folders in one and they pop up in the other and vice versa).
Note the \ in front of the \Mac\Home\Documents… path. I’m not a Windows guy, but I think that’s how Windows specifies something as a network path?
I don’t know why I didn’t pick up on that before. I think this simplifies the puzzle quite a bit. I’m sorry if that made things needlessly confusing for you, Jan.
Okay, it’s weird that now the project.presets.cfg exists, but happy that at least this works.
Still it’s not clear why the files of the folders can’t be copied on the machines while the folders itself can be created. You could copy the folders yourself from where you unpacked the zip and then everything would be fine.
One thing is clear, only the plain copy operations (the copy function is really a system built in “copyFile” function) are blocked. The operations that manually create a file (create, open, write something, close) do work, because this is how the project.presets.cfg is written. This is because it is actually updated and not plainly copied because otherwise individual project presets would be overwritten.
Also the test function I mentioned before that checks if the app can write into the documents folder does not copy a file but also writes some data into a manually created file.
Maybe some file permission settings cause that “file copy not working” effect. I don’t know. I hope that this problem is gone once there is a normal installer for V8. This would install the files freshly with default rights instead of just unzipping something etc. . I will send you a private message with a drop box link that lets you download an installer package that will install the beta version just like the release will be installed. I cross my fingers that this will work.
That the DPI scaling works with the other system is now also clear to me. With beta 11 I changed default values and this did not operate well with the settings you already made. You can btw right-click on the “beta version” box at the lower right of the main window and reset all settings. When you restart the app again then you will have the same result as with the new machine you used.
Hi Jan,
managed to run the installer you DM’ed me. Haven’t had any time to test a lot before work, but wanted to mention that the missing file issue seems to have been resolved by this.
The app still crashes, but I’m starting to think this might be something on my end, after it worked well on Windows 11 on the other machine. To make sure, I’m installing a Windows 11 VM on my personal MBP tonight to see if that resolves the crashing. I’ll keep you posted.
Another quick update.
Pro Motion NG 8 beta now runs flawlessly on both machines via Parallels Desktop 18 + Windows 11, using your latest installer. Very happy now. Phew… what a thread.
Thank you Jan, for the lengthy, support and effort you put into this. I think we at least managed to clear out a few issues along the way, which is good.
I will continue testing.
by the way. Are projects saved in the v8 beta backwards compatible? ie. Can I open them in v7? Or do I need to take care with this?
Hmm… I spoke too soon.
After the initial euphoria of a working v8, the crashing has quickly come back. First it freezes for a few seconds. Then gone. No crash reporter or anything. How unfortunate.
I wonder if it is to do with me having saved a Custom Windows layout, as after that, the crashing began. Jan, where are custom layouts stored? How can I delete mine? I want to see if it makes a difference on the crashing.
Hi @DutchDimension,
yes, you can load V8 projects with latest V7 but you will loose layer groups.
Actually I have no idea about what’s going on, because the behavior seems to always be different.
To again have a good base for further testing, please do:
After that please start the installed V8 beta again. Because all this is a kind of full reset, you should see a start up screen with some settings as mentioned before. DPI scaling should be enabled.
You should get no error message, neither containing system font nor missing palettes.
Then we will go from there.
-Jan
Hi Jan,
I may have found what’s been causing the crashing.
First things first though. I did exactly what you recommended in your latest post. Cleared out all the previous beta 8 versions, and deleted their entries in the regedit.
I re-installed the beta 8 installer that you had sent to me in a Direct Message. I installed the app with no problems. No missing fonts, a nice start up screen with some settings, and DPI scaling properly.
Before doing anything, I let the app run in the background for a while. See if it would eventually crash. It didn’t, so I loaded up several projects and clicked around a bit. Also no problem. So I tried more things, like, closing and re-opening projects, saving several custom window layouts, opening menus. All no problem. Great!
So then my suspicion… I loaded up my custom ‘Keyboard Shortcuts’ .scc file that I’ve gradually been building up during my working sessions with V7.x. As soon as I did that, the app froze and crashed. Restarted several times… more crashes when clicking around in the main interface. So I tried to go back into the ‘Keyboard Shortcuts’ window to ‘Reset to Default’. And what do you know… the crashing stopped then and there.
I’ve been alternating between the Default and my Custom shortcuts several times now and the results are perfectly repeatable. So we may just have found the issue. I’ll sent you the .scc file in a Direct Message, if you want to confirm. I’d be interested to know if you can repeat the crash.
Cheers!
ps. Congratulations on the v8 release. I upgraded earlier today.
Actually can I mail you the .scc file? It seems I’m not allowed to send anything but images with this forum software.
