Konica Minolta GDI Printer Usage with Apple Silicon Macs / newer MacOS versions

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Konica Minolta GDI Printer Usage with Apple Silicon Macs / newer MacOS versions

Konica Minolta dropped printer driver support for newer MacOS versions and also for Apple Silicon based Macs for many of their legacy, GDI based printers long ago. For example for the very robust magicolor 4690mf the latest driver update was in 2016. I searched quite a while for a workaround (and there are some closed threads in this forum about the subject) and none worked. Recently, however, I found the following working setup which I want to share here with the community. It boils down to running a emulated Windows 7 with UTM on my Mac Mini M1, 2020 and printing PDF files from that machine.

Here are the details:

Mac mini, macOS 15.3

Posted on Mar 15, 2025 01:07 PM

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Answer 1

a brody

Level 10

85,257 points

Mar 15, 2025 04:56 PM in response to danherde

VirtualPC? I haven't heard that name in 19 years!

Running Windows on a Mac, and Connecting … - Apple Community

Offers numerous other solutions for running Windows on Apple Silicon Macs, although you need the ARM release of Windows to install it on your Mac, and they are much more current than VirtualPC.

UTM though is a good alternative as I listed it.

You might also want to check Gimp or Guten print. Many of those drivers are available when you hold the Option key and attempt to locate and add the printer when you hard wire the printer directly to your Mac, or add the printer to the same WiFi network as the Mac. If the printer appears on the System Preference/Setting while adding it with the Option key, it is tapping into those drivers. Sourceforge is another place to find additional open source drivers for the Mac.

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Answer 2

danherde Author

Level 1

4 points

Mar 16, 2025 10:39 AM in response to a brody

Thank you for your reply. By "Virtual PC" I was referring to the emulated x86_64 Windows 7 on the Mac Mini M1, not to the VirtualPC virtualization legacy product.

As to your alternative suggestions, I had tried all those other without success:

I installed a Windows 11 ARM release but the Konica Minolta printer drivers do not work there as the magicolor 4690MF uses a GDI-based Windows driver requiring direct kernel-mode access.
Gimp, Gutenprint or CUPS-PDF drivers do not work either.
I didn't try the "hold Option key" variant, but given the limitations of this robust but very old printer I don't believe it would help (besides my setup doesn't allow me to hard wir the printer directly to the Mac).
Emulating a more recent x86_64 Windows version on the Mac Mini M1 is too slow.

Thus, emulating Windows 7 turns out to be a workable solution for me.

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Answer 3

a brody

Level 10

85,257 points

Mar 16, 2025 12:00 PM in response to danherde

It is a good idea to share the info you found with Konica.

They are far behind the times when it comes to offering high end printer drivers for high end printers at least for the model you have asked for.

They would be aghast that you can't even run Windows 10 for your desires.

Xerox has comparable printers that work quite well on every Mac OS to the present.

Canon does too.

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Konica Minolta GDI Printer Usage with Apple Silicon Macs / newer MacOS versions

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