Hey all,

I'm currently trying to setup SheepShaver on my friends Windows Vista Home Premium and on my first attempt after setting everything up correctly (or so I thought) I was greeted with the "Cannot map RAM: No Error" message upon trying to start the emulator.

I had the memory set to 512mb of RAM so I thought I'd try to lower it. 256mb did the same thing and so did 1024 but 128mb and lower would load up the startup screen and pieces of the bar down the bottom would load up and before it reaches the desktop it just crashes out.

I've done a lot of reading through the forums and so far I have tried checking my "Ignore Illegal Memory Accesses" box and starting the emulator but it did nothing. I've also grabbed the Mac OS 9 boot image from the Redundant Robot website and booting with that but it does the same thing to me.

It could be worth mentioning my friend has got and an Intel dual core CPU however she is running a 32 bit OS. I also have cdenable.sys in the right folder to prevent the error message but I know that is unrelated.

Here is a copy of my stderr file after booting into OS 9 and crashing before the desktop with 128mb ram set:




Here is my stdout output:



The versions of SS I used were the 5/5/2010 release and then eventually the August 30, 2010 release. My SDL dll was included in the 5/5/2010 release and my GTK release I got from here http://www.emaculation.com/sheepshaver/ ... -setup.exe as per this windows setup guide: http://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/sheepshaver_setup.

My ROM files are from the 5/5/2010 release (Mac_OS_ROM) and the newworld86.rom file from Redundant Robots site (I also tried removing the extension from the newworld86 ROM file).

The only other thing that could be pertinent to all this is that all the time I have been attempting to boot OS 9 from an image. Either the one from the Redundant Robot site or a toast image of OS9 I have.

In a last ditch attempt just now I tried out the old world ROM that came with the 5/5/2010 release and if I set SS to use 128mb of RAM it will now boot up and stay seemingly stable but I would still like to find a way to push forwards and increase the RAM as this doesn't make much sense to me. On my own computer I use the included new world ROM just fine with 512mb of RAM using the exact same files I'm using right now.

Thanks for your help and I hope you have enough information to go on here hehe.

Hi, welcome to the forum!

Your problem is well known, but not easily fixed

When SheepShaver starts, it has to reserve the memory amount you set in the prefs. This reservation can sometimes fail when there is no continuous free memory, hence the error. And that's also why you can run with the limited amount of memory you assigned. A second issue is that sometimes, when trying to start SheepShaver a second time, it finds it can't map it's memory requirements on the spot it used earlier.

There's no easy fix: you could try to find programs running in the background and try to eliminate as many as possible, thus freeing memory.
And to solve the possible occurrence of the second problem, you should restart your machine before trying again.

A last remedy could be to try to use an older SheepShaver build. It suffers from some problems, but might run what you need to run: http://www.emaculation.com/sheepshaver/ ... .win32.zip

EDIT: one forum user reported stopping avast antivirus solved his/her problem. Another user reports that stopping Logitech's Bluetooth SetPoint SysTray App solve the problem.
(this is not to say that these programs are the culprit, they are just examples of the fact that background programs can conflict with SheepShaver)

Best,
Cat_7

Or you can get more RAM.

Thank you both Cat_7 and Julialy I will give both of those suggestions a try. My friend does have a few things running in the background indeed so I shall be taking a look at those and it can never hurt to have some extra RAM.