Technical Note OS505

Gestalt Manager Q&As

CONTENTS Determining whether a Macintosh is a U.S. machine Downloadables

This Technical Note contains a collection of archived Q&As relating to a specific topic--questions sent the Developer Support Center (DSC) along with answers from the DSC engineers. Current Q&As can be found on the Macintosh Technical Q&As web site. Dec 01 1992

Determining whether a Macintosh is a U.S. machine

Date written: 1/13/93

Last reviewed: 6/14/93

Is there a way to check whether the Macintosh my application is running on is a U.S. machine? I could check the nationality of the system software that's running, but I need something that a user can't easily change. We're having problems with local resellers selling nonexport copies of our software abroad and need a good, not easily circumvented solution.

There's no way to tell the difference because there is no hardware difference. You can use Gestalt to determine the type of keyboard and the kind of script system installed. You can even use it to look and see whether the MAP cdev is set to anything other than the United States. But none of these will tell you what you want to know for certain. You could, for example, find a user in the United States using German software with a German keyboard. If you're having problems with local resellers selling nonexport copies of your software abroad, you might include a special label on the package itself that differentiates the software for the end user.

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