When you run the Plaque Simulator installer it will place files in various places on your startup disk. If you are running MacOSX the is located in the OSX folder. Under the previous OS9 the Plaque Simulator application folder was located in the Applications (Mac OS 9) folder. For backwards compatability reasons, the folder remains located in the OS9 folder at the root level of the startup drive.

MacOSX also intoduces a new user interface element, the "Dock", which by default runs along the bottom of the screen (although it can be moved to the sides). In the dock are aliases (or "shortcuts") to commonly used programs or folders. Programs which are currently running are marked by small black triangles. In the example below an alias to Plaque Simulator is near the left end of the dock.

In the Plaque Simulator application folder are two versions of the application and a common data folder. If you are running OSX, Plaque Simulator X is the carbonized version of the application that you will use. Plaque Simulator 5.2.x is the OS9 version. If you are still running under OS9, that is the version you should use.

The Plaque Simulator Data folder MUST be located in the same folder as the application. The data folder organizes the support files required by both the OS9 and OSX versions of Plaque Simulator. When Plaque Simulator launches it recursively looks for these support files in the the data folder. The contents of folders whose names are enclosed in (), such as (User Guide), are skipped during this process. For example, when Plaque Simulator launches we want it to find Physics and Inventory files, but we don't want to waste time parsing through 150 MB of (User Guide) files.

The Plaque Simulator Patients folder is located in the OS9 Documents folder at the root level of the startup hard drive. As with the data folder, when Plaque Simulator launches it recursively looks for patient files in the patients folder. The contents of folders whose names are enclosed in (), such as (Old Patients), are skipped during this process. For example, when Plaque Simulator launches we want it to find Current Patients and maybe Recent Patients files, but we don't want to waste time parsing through megabytes of (Old Patients) files.