novafix

A quick and dirty fix for EV Nova on OS X El Capitan and beyond.

A super-automatic installer resides here, for those of you that stumbled upon this and don't have Xcode installed.

tl;dr

If you want it to fix the application bundle so that you can just launch EV Nova as you normally would:

1. Clone the repo
2. Run make install

If you don't want to touch the application bundle (even though you can always make uninstall):

1. Clone the repo
2. Run make
3. Run ./launcher.sh

If your copy of EV Nova happens to not be in /Applications/EV Nova.app, you'll need adjust the EVROOT variable in both the Makefile and the launcher.sh to contain the path to your bundle.

The Problem

2015-10-07 22:52:07.530 EV Nova[17753:652894] 22:52:07.530 WARNING:  140: This application, or a library it uses, is using the deprecated Carbon Component Manager for hosting Audio Units. Support for this will be removed in a future release. Also, this makes the host incompatible with version 3 audio units. Please transition to the API's in AudioComponent.h.
2015-10-07 22:52:32.576 EV Nova[17753:652894] Error loading /Applications/EV Nova.app/Contents/Frameworks/ASWCarbonSparkleBridge.bundle/Contents/MacOS/ASWCarbonSparkleBridge:  dlopen(/Applications/EV Nova.app/Contents/Frameworks/ASWCarbonSparkleBridge.bundle/Contents/MacOS/ASWCarbonSparkleBridge, 262): Symbol not found: _NewOTProcessUPP
  Referenced from: /Applications/EV Nova.app/Contents/Frameworks/ASWCarbonSparkleBridge.bundle/Contents/MacOS/ASWCarbonSparkleBridge
  Expected in: /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/CoreServices
dyld: lazy symbol binding failed: Symbol not found: _CGSSetWindowDepthLimit
  Referenced from: /Applications/EV Nova.app/Contents/MacOS/EV Nova
  Expected in: /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/ApplicationServices

dyld: Symbol not found: _CGSSetWindowDepthLimit
  Referenced from: /Applications/EV Nova.app/Contents/MacOS/EV Nova
  Expected in: /System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions/A/ApplicationServices

Trace/BPT trap

Particularly the last bit about CGSSetWindowDepthLimit. That's what keeps it from running, since it appears this function (which seems to not be public API) was silently removed from El Capitan.

The Solution

The Console message above lets you know exactly what it needs. By disassembling CGSSetWindowDepthLimit on a machine that still has it, you can see it's a no-op (see below), so injecting one doesn't hurt.

(lldb) disass -n CGSSetWindowDepthLimit
CoreGraphics`CGSSetWindowDepthLimit:
CoreGraphics[0x3bed8a]:  pushq  %rbp
CoreGraphics[0x3bed8b]:  movq   %rsp, %rbp
CoreGraphics[0x3bed8e]:  xorl   %eax, %eax
CoreGraphics[0x3bed90]:  popq   %rbp
CoreGraphics[0x3bed91]:  retq   

libNova.A.dylib is a dylib containing just a function named CGSSetWindowDepthLimit. Using dyld's environment variables, it is injected before anything else, and the namespace is flattened, via launcher.sh.

Troubleshooting

There is an issue that I believe to be related to dyld caching, which will cause the dynamic linker to no longer be able to find _gliCreateContextWithShared from the GLEngine bundle inside of the OpenGL framework. This often happens after an OS update. To fix this, run the original EV Nova binary once (allowing it to crash on start), and then it should start working again. Assuming your EV Nova is installed in the Applications folder, the command would be:

$ /Applications/EV\ Nova.app/Contents/MacOS/Ev\ Nova.original