Working Installer/Updater for FF 9.008 ?

Addendum...

Some more details to add, in order to trace the problem...

All FF downloads come as disk-images (.dmg) that have checksums, and all get verified when mounted. All these checksums are passed without error, so the actual .dmg downloads are perfectly valid and not corrupted - neither on the Filterforge server nor during the download process.

Inside the .dmg files (once mounted) there sits one install-package file (.pkg) that gets opened by the OS-X built-in installer - and this is the moment where the error occurs. The installer checks the .pkg file and then complains about an "invalid digital signature".

Now some pretty odd observations: In this thread there are links to all older software versions:
https://www.filterforge.com/forum/read...&TID=15162

If I download "Filter Forge 9 Setup.dmg" from there then it obviously already *is* the 9.008 version. The .pkg has a creation date of 27th Dec 2020 and it fails.

The version from DAZ3D instead has a creation date of 9th Dec 2019 and it works. So it seems to be no problem with anything outdated, but rather by something that happened after 2019.

This gets confirmed by "Filter Forge 7 Setup.dmg" (created 2018) and "Filter Forge 8 Setup.dmg" (created 2019) from this site, both can be launched.

But "Filter Forge 10 Setup.dmg" (created 2021) refuses to launch with the same "invalid digital signature" error.

Thank you for your reply, but if you actually read my initial post you may notice the crucial line:

Quote
because I could use it on an older working machine (running OS-X 10.11)

I want/need it for a legacy system, it was/is still sold by DAZ3D... that's why I did this (and nothing else).

Having said that... I *did* find a workaround. It is slightly nasty, but if anyone here stumbles across the same problem, this is how you can get your software.

To whom it may concern:

Problem: All earlier Mac Installers from 2020 (Filter Forge 9 Setup.dmg) refuse to run due to an obscure "invalid digital signature" error that seems to affect versions 9 to 11.

There is no way to bypass this check in the built-in installer software, but there is a way to extract FilterForge out of this package manually. For this you need to realize that it actually is a cascade of several archives stuffed into each other.

You need:
1) An archive extractor of your choice. If you don't have one get something like TheUnarchiver (free).
2) You need to display file extensions in the Finder. If turned off, turn it on temporarily in Finder > Preferences > Advanced

Now:

3) Download "Filter Forge 9 Setup.dmg" (or similar) fr om here. Double-click and mount it.
4) Copy "Filter Forge 9.pkg" onto your harddisk - best create a new folder for this.
5) Drag "Filter Forge 9.pkg" onto your Unarchiver, it creates a folder "Filter Forge 9" next to it. Open that.
6) Rename "FilterForge9.pkg" to "FilterForge9.xar", It turns into a folder... open that.
7) Rename file "Payload" to "Payload.xar", drag that onto your Unarchiver... it creates a single new file called "Payload".
8 ) Rename the new file "Payload" to "Payload.gz" (!) and drag that onto your Unarchiver...
9) And that's it... you have your software inside the (yet) new "Payload" folder.

The "Library" folder only has a symlink to the PS-plug - copy it to any place on your Mac wh ere Photoshop looks for filters.
The "Applications" folder contains the folder "Filter Forge 9" which is exactly the folder that the installer would have copied to your "Application" folder... copy it yourself and you're done. (and you can delete all other extracted files and folders)

So - this sounds much more complicated as it actually is. The whole voodoo is that FilterForge actually is a GZ-archive (without a file extension), within an XAR-archive (without a file extension), within a folder (pretending to be a file), within an XAR-archive (pretending to be a .pkg file)...

Hope that helps... but I would actually recommend to fix this signature stuff, at least as long as you sell the previous versions in other shops.