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An incomplete FAQ of Sheepshaver

Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008 3:13 am
by yksoft1
1. What is Sheepshaver?
An emulator which partially emulates a Power Macintosh 9500 or 9600. Development started in
1998 on BeOS/PPC as shareware, then became open source in 2002 and has been ported to various
platforms such as Linux/x86, Windows NT, Mac OS X/x86 and Mac OS X/PPC. It shared much code
with another Mac emulator, Basilisk II.
2. What is emulated in Sheepshaver?
A PowerPC CPU (with some Altivec support) with incomplete implemention of memory manager,
a frame buffer for display output supporting up to 1600*1200 with millions of colors,
an audio DSP supporting CD-quality sound output, Open Transport-compatible Ethernet,
ADB keyboard and mouse, a "Unix" or "My Computer" disk shared from host system.
3. What is not emulated in Sheepshaver?
A complete memory management unit, Open Firmware, 2D/3D display accelerator, SCSI/IDE bus
(hard disks and CDROMs), USB/Fireware/Airport, and many more.
4. How does it access disks without SCSI/IDE support?
Sheepshaver patches the ROM routines to think the disk images and CD-ROMs it mounted as large
floppy disks so they can be accessed by Mac OS.
5. What's necessary to setup a working Sheepshaver virtual machine?
A PCI Power Macintosh ROM or an early version of New World Mac's Mac OS ROM, a large disk image,
a boot disk and an installer of Mac OS.
6. How can I get the ROM?
You can "rip" one from a beige Power Macintosh or Powerbook with PCI bus(this excludes all
6100/7100/8100 and LC, all PB5300/1400/2400, and all Macs newer than the Beige G3). They must be
exactly 4 megabytes in size. Or you can also use some versions of the file Mac OS ROM from Mac OS
8.6 or Mac OS ROM update 1.0.
7. What Mac OS can I use?
It depends on your ROM.
ROMs booting with monochrome background and monochrome icon: System 7.5.3 through Mac OS 9.0.4
(note some ROMs won't boot retail Mac OS 7.6 or 7.6.1, if they come from Power Mac 7600).
ROMs booting with monochrome background and color icon: Mac OS 8.1 through 9.0.4.
ROMs booting with gray background and color icon: Mac OS 8.5 through 9.0.4.
8. Is my Mac OS installation in Sheepshaver cross-platform?
It also depends on the ROM.
Generally retail installations of Mac OS 8.6 is not bootable anymore when ROM has been changed.
It's recommended to delete the Sheepshaver_nvram file after changing ROM.
9. Can I run Mac OS X/Linux/any other OS?
That's not possible. Lack of Open Firmware makes Sheepshaver unable to boot anything other than
Mac OS, lack of a complete MMU emulation renders most Unix-like kernels unbootable in Sheepshaver.
10. I can't boot from CDROM anymore after OS 9 is installed!
remove the nvram file or unbless the OS 9 System Folder.
11. An old game from 80's hangs/crashes Sheepshaver!
Sheepshaver's compatibility with older programs is not even as good as Apple's own Classic emulator.
You may first run the game in Basilisk II and if it doesn't, probably it also won't run in Sheepshaver.
12. Quicktime Player (or any application/game that uses QuickTime) crashes Sheepshaver.
One of SheepShaver's biggest issue is QuickTime, especially in the Mac OS X version. in my experience
NO Quicktime after version 3 run without problems at all in Sheepshaver. on Windows version of SS, Quicktime
4.1 (and 5.0) runs more or less while Quicktime 3.0 just crash the emulator and Quicktime 6.0.3 refuses
to display any video. In Mac OS X version of SS, under some configurations all "modern" versions of Quicktime
just don't work at all. Do some research and find a supported Quicktime by yourself.
13. How much RAM I should give to Sheepshaver?
If you run Mac OS 9, You should associate at least 64 megabytes to Sheepshaver to run effectively. most newer
programs requires more than 15-20 megabytes (with virtual memory unavailable) just to start.
14. Can I print in Sheepshaver?
The parallel port emulation is far to be useful now even in Windows version and there is no USB support. So you
can't rely on Sheepshaver for printing out your old documents. printing via Appleshare may work, provided the network
is correctly configured.
You can also try printing them to PDF in Sheepshaver.
15. How to set up Internet in Sheepshaver?
You must install a working Open Transport first (bundled after system 7.5.3). Choose the network emulation type
(router or slirp) in the GUI or sheepshaver_prefs (ether router/ether slirp). If you use OS 9 in Windows version of SS,
you need to install an older version of Open Transport to replace the bundled one or it won't work.
for the Router network: set the IP address to anything in 192.168.0.x range (need to be different than the current host
IP address). set the subnet mask to 255.255.255.0. set the router address to 192.168.0.1, and set DNS address to any
available one.
for the Slirp network: just set TCP/IP to DHCP (the default in OS8 and OS9).
16. Can I run Carbon applications in Sheepshaver?
You can run those Carbon applications that only need 8.6, but it will be extremely slow and memory hungry so if you are using Mac OS X and your Carbon applications run under it, you don't need Sheepshaver to run them.

Posted: Fri Feb 01, 2008 4:47 pm
by Stephen Coates
Great. :)

This will be useful. I keep planning to set sheepshaver up on this system, but I always forget. I will have to write it down.

Would you like me to give the FAQ a tidy up and put it on it's own page on Emaculation?

Posted: Sat Feb 02, 2008 3:43 am
by yksoft1
Stephen Coates wrote:Great. :)

This will be useful. I keep planning to set sheepshaver up on this system, but I always forget. I will have to write it down.

Would you like me to give the FAQ a tidy up and put it on it's own page on Emaculation?
No problem.
Though only used SS for half an year, as a long-term user of Basilisk II and vMac, I don't think SS is too hard for me.

Printing Solved

Posted: Sat Mar 21, 2009 7:26 pm
by calion
Check out the Printing in OSX thread for the answer to SheepShaver printing problems.