Hi SheepShaver Community,

This could be an ignorant post by me - my first, however:

I am an original Mac user & technician back to 1984 - still have my Mac Plus running well. I do Mac support for many departments at the Duke University Research Medical Center & Hospitals.

I love the idea of ShapeShifter - it's basically "Classic" for new Mac OS' beyond 10.3 Panther. However, it seems application compatibility is quite insufficient. I can barely run any program without a system crash - I can't even play an old ".aiff" sound file without a system crash in ShapeShifter. It seems anything I open beyond built-in Apple things like control panels, Jigsaw puzzle, etc crash ShapeShifter. I can't even play my old favorite game, TaskMaker.

ShapeShifter would be a perfect solution for using many old medical / genetic / research applications built for OS 9 at the Duke medical center - however many simple functions & applications crash ShapeShifter. Many of these applications use a USB to serial converter for various types of special devices.

My question: are the Application incompatibilities due to poor PPC support in ShapeShifter, or perhaps a bad / different ROM? I see ShapeShifter is still actively being worked on - but release notes are always conducive to new Mac operating system operational support - and never increased PPC compatibility.

Shouldn't PPC compatibility be first & foremost to a working product? Sure, ShapeShifter opens on Lion now, but I still can't get it to run hardly any actual Classic applications without crashing.

It seems there are just a couple people actually performing the ShapeShifter development. Could PPC support become fist & foremost developmental priority, before the individuals who know this architecture are lost forever?

Or are my concerns misjudged by settings or a different ROM?

Thanks!

- Marcus

Hi and welcome,

Your observation regarding ppc emulation issues is roughly correct, however, many people run their apps on SheepShaver. Rom issues can exist, you should preferably use the new world rom when running OS 9. An important setting in the GUI is to enable "ignore illegal memory access". This setting has become more and more important in SheepShaver.
You should also not use any quicktime version above 4.1.2 to ensure maximum compatibility.

Development and support for things like USB are not to be expected as, as you noticed, core development is stalled.

Best,
Cat_7

Have you been watching Fringe?

Thank you so much for the prompt reply. I will try a New World ROM, ignoring illegal memory access, and the older Quicktime version.

If development ever starts again, just getting the PPC emulation right would be so great! I remember rosetta was only a 5 MB file or so....

Thanks!

ShapeShifter is an old theme/skinning utility for Mac OS 10.1-10.3.9... and perhaps Tiger... it is also the type of alien race/species that Security Chief Odo belongs to on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

SheepShaver is a cross-platform, alpha/beta-quality emulator that lets you run a number of MacOS Classic/PowerPC apps.

_________________
My Setup:

• iMac G3/600 (Summer 2001; DVD-ROM)
• 1 GB RAM
• 80 GB HDD
• Ethernet (wired)
• MintPPC 11 (config file used: http://mac.linux.be/files/xorg/imac10.txt) with XFCE4; instead of the default LXDE.

Shapeshifter is also the predecessor to Basilisk II on the Amiga, focusing more on 68k Macs. Sheepshaver is still very incomplete, and work has been sporadic because of the difficulties working with the code. I could try to fix the whole code up, but that would take quite a bit of effort.

SheepShaver was also planned for AmigaOS. BasiliskII has also version for AmigaOS :)

Perhaps your sound device is misconfigured somehow?

I've played that (and its sequel) all the way through in Basilisk II without any problems. It is not a PPC game, so SheepShaver is not needed.

...Are they LabVIEW applications, by any chance? If the source code is still available, it shouldn't be too difficult to get them running under Windows – provided you don't mind shelling out for a license for the Windows version of LabVIEW.

System crash issues: Do these still happen if you boot with shift held down? It's likely an extension conflict.

TaskMaker: Run it under Basilisk II -- it works fine under 7.6.1.

LabVIEW: Doesn't this run under Wineskin? No need to run Windows, but you will need a Windows license for LabVIEW. Then again, the OS 8 version of LabVIEW should also work; the latest versions for Classic required greater than 9.0.4 IIRC, and so aren't compatible with SheepShaver. Possibly you could run OS X 10.4 under PearPC, and run Classic inside it (does this work? I seem to be drawing a blank on whether Classic runs in that configuration, and haven't attempted it, which strongly implies to me that Classic is incompatible with PearPC).

and yes, I can remember when Basilisk was ShapeShifter. It was the best way to run MacOS, AmigaOS and DOS on the same platform back in the day :)


The best bet is likely the project I've been looking at encouraging: integrating MacOnLinux into QEmuPPC so that you can boot OS 9.2.2 directly from qemu.

To make your assumption fact: Classic doesn't run in PearPC.

Best,
Cat_7

Is this "best bet" of yours actual fact or mere wishful thinking? It would indeed be great if 9.2.2 could be run in Qemu or Q, but I've been unable to confirm any actual work is being done along those lines. The Q homepage (http://www.kju-app.org/) hasn't been updated, as far as I can tell, since 31 March 2008! How's that for development?

That is true for the Qemu OSX port, not for other Qemu development.
I ran PPC linux in Qemu in Windows, but it was dead slow. My aim was not to run MOL on it (which in itself hasn't been updated since 2007), but to compile SheepShaver for PPC machines (which also failed, and I gave up).

Best,
Cat_7

Oh, well, there's a native OS X version of LabVIEW for that sort of thing.

Eh? Unless QEmuPPC supports the MMU somehow, it would be limited to 9.0.4, just like Sheepshaver.

http://ellcc.org/ellcc/share/doc/qemu/q ... femulation

Qemu-ppc supports full PowerPC 32 bit emulation, including privileged instructions, FPU and MMU. I've tried it and it works. It's slow, but it works. However, I still haven't got MoL running on it.