My wife has a Vinyl Cutter that she uses to make these awesome signs/gifts/etc. Basically anything she can create in a drawing program she can cut out in adhesive vinyl.
For years, she has used CorelDraw to do the graphic work. But this was on an old XP workstation. We needed to move to a newer platform. One of her biggest concerns with moving to a MacBook (on loan from her daughter) was that CorelDraw wasn't available for OSX. Adobe Illustrator would work, but is far to expensive to justify the purchase. There is an open-source alternative - Inscape - that does work fairly well, but we weren't sure if it would interface well with the cutter. And it is just easier to use what you are familiar with.
The solution turned out to be using vmWare Fusion. I was able to create a Windows7 virtual machine, install CorelDraw it and it works wonderfully. I really like how Fusion integrates the Windows directories with the OSX ones - The Windows desktop is redirected to the OSX desktop, Documents, Downloads, etc all map correspondingly.

BUT - I couldn't get the GCC Bengal drivers to install. This is a Taiwanese company that makes a very nice cutter, but has a HORRIBLE web site and nonexistent customer service. They have yet to return a single one of my support calls. If you go to the download section of their website, most driver/firmware files do not have file names that tell you what model they are for. You can't tell until you unzip the file - and in most cases they are using RAR compression. There is no search function.
Once I located and downloaded the 64 bit driver for Windows7, it would not install. After connecting the cutter to the USB port, Windows said that it could not install a driver for that device. I ran the driver installer that I downloaded and it failed to install. After much searching and hair pulling, I found several references (not on their website) to GCC cutters having a GCC USB mode, as well as a Common USB mode. I suspected that this might be the issue. So I found another document that documented how to change the mode. No luck. None of the button combinations that were listed did anything on our cutter.
My next guess was that perhaps the firmware on the cutter (we have had it for several years) was obsolete. After downloading a half-dozen of the firmware files, I found one that was for the Bengal BN-60 cutter. They also had a firmware uploader utility. BUT the utility assumes that you have a working USB connection to the printer. Which I didn't have on that computer. So back to the XP machine. I copied the firmware file and the uploader utility to the XP machine, and ran the uploader. It would get to about 79% completed and then time out.
More searching and hair pulling. I eventually came upon a document that mentioned turning off the cutter, pressing the Pause button, and turning it back on with the pause button held it. The XP machine then said "New Hardware detected" and recognized the cutter as a GCC Jaguar cutter (a different model of cutter that GCC sells). Tell Windows to auto-install the driver which it did since the driver I had on the XP box had multiple GCC devices supported..
This time the firmware upload utility worked and I successfully installed the 2.05 firmware to the cutter. This version of the firmware enabled me to change the USB mode - through a series of button combinations - to the Common USB mode. Plugged the cutter back into the Macbook. Powered up the VM for Windows7 and SUCCESS, it recognized the USB device, and configured it using the driver I had previously attempted to install.
The steps that worked for me:
Note: downloads require (free) GCCWorld registration
- Upgrade Firmware
- Download, extract and install Uploader V.3.01-01
- Download and extract Firmware V2.05-02
- Connect cutter to XP machine (had GCC drivers / USB ports working)
- Place cutter into a firmware install mode
- Power off the cutter
- Press and hold the Pause button
- Power on the cutter (don't know how long to hold, I did it until windows recognized the device)
- Let Windows install the Jaguar driver automatically
- Run the Uploader and upload the Bengal 2.05 firmware over the GCC USB port
- Cutter status lights will flash for a while as it installs the firmware
- After it has completed, disconnect from the XP machine and power cycle the cutter
- Change to USB Common Mode
- Press the On/Offline button to place in offline mode
- Press the Pause and Origin Set buttons together
- Press the Cut Test button to set to Common USB Mode
- Press Origin Set to save settings
- Install Printer Driver
- Download, extract and install Driver (USB), 32/64bit V2.02-01
- Follow the on-screen instructions for the driver installation