This forum (rightly) forbids direct links to full SheepShaver-based systems that include Mac OS, so I won't put any direct links here, but I've now put together standalone SheepShaver systems with US-English OS 9.0.4 installed. I'd posted a message earlier about a Windows version, but I've now got a similar one for OS X/macOS.

Both include built-in printing to the default host printer, or to any host printer that you select from a pop-up menu, or to a PDF created on the host desktop. Each lets you transfer files from the host to SheepShaver by dropping a file in the host on the application that launches SheepShaver.

To find these systems, Google-search "Mac OS 9 for Windows" (in quotes, preferably). This will take you to the page for the Windows-based system. That page includes a link to the OS X/macOS-based system.

Again, I fully understand that these are unsupported systems, that this forum can take no official or even unofficial interest in them in any way, that they are not endorsed in any way by this site. I'm posting about them simply for the convenience of anyone who might find them useful.

The version for OS X/macOS that I posted earlier was missing a few lines of code in the launcher so an error message appeared at startup. Fixed now. Apologies to anyone who tried it.

Heh; I just stumbled across your website in Google while looking up something completely unrelated. Way to go on the page ranking!

I've updated and improved this in a number of minor ways. The latest features are listed in the web page that you can find by searching for "Mac OS 9 for Windows".

As a result of discussions in another thread, I've also updated the OS X/macOS version so that it's now suitable for multiuser systems. If you decide to set this up for a multiuser system, then it would make sense to enable to multiuser features in OS 9 also. In SheepShaver, go to the Extensions Manager, switch to the "MacOS9 Multiuser Extensions" set, shut down, and restart, and set up the system for multiple users.

EDIT: It would be easy to add a feature to this system that would optionally mount an additional (unbootable) disk image for whichever user happens to be using the system at the moment. This would allow all users to keep their data completely separate from each other, without cluttering the boot disk image. I may get around to that later this week.

Agreed - thanks again. Either approach - password, or user copies of the system - is OK for me. In my case (two users) several gigabytes of added apps and data can be put into images declared as extra SheepSaver volumes, in a shared location (e.g., Users/Shared, with the right permissions). Any needed accompanying OS9 System Folder additions can be kept track of and placed in both user’s system copies; the multiuser concept would eliminate this tracking step but the number of additions is fairly small, not a big deal. I’m impressed with SheepShaver-based systems. Your printing and file-transfer options are icing on the cake!

The OS X version of this now includes an option (accessed by holding down the Option key when the app starts) to create, delete, or replace a data disk image that will be visible in SheepShaver only to the user who created it the disk. This, combined, with the multi-user features of OS 9, makes the system even more suitable for multi-user OS X/macOS systems.

In order to be sure that this works, I limited the size of the user data disk to 16GB, but anyone can edit the AppleScript to increase that limit, or simply use the hdiutil utility to create a larger disk in the right location (which will be clear from the AppleScript).

I've now fixed some bad logic in the AppleScript of the OS X version. The app will now reliably recognize a user-created data disk (rather than sometimes waiting until the second time it runs).

I mentioned this in another thread, but you may want to look into using shadow copies of the initial disk image so that each user gets their own fork.

The only thread I can find is this one, but maybe I'm wrong;

viewtopic.php?f=34&t=9020&p=53740&hilit=shadow+copy#p53740

You surely know more about this than anyone else here. Could you provide step-by-step details of how shadow copies could be used this way? All I can find online is information on mounting shadow copies, but that doesn't seem useful for SheepShaver. Again, we will all be grateful for practical, step-by-step details.

Looks Like I was confusing temporary shadow mounting a la http://krypted.com/mac-security/shadow- ... h-hdiutil/ with Paragon's HFS+ snapshotting technology. The current hdiutil options will by default throw away the changes when you unmount.

However, this can be partially fixed by using the tip here:
http://www.macenterprise.org/articles/c ... hadowfiles

So... based on the discussion between Charles & I in the QEMU megathread, you'd need something like this:


Then launch SheepShaver using disk image "/dev/rdisk$DEVNUM"

Finally, when your wrapper quits, run
and do something in your wrapper that checks for the presence of this file and boots using this instead of the original image.

This may need a bit of tweaking, and it seems to me there should be a way to keep a diff file instead of a full shadow volume, but the method currently eludes me.

[edit] I guess you could just keep your shadow files without merging back, and just reference the shadow file you created the next time you run hdiutil attach. This is probably preferable. You can even create different snapshots by creating a new shadow file the next time you boot, and switch between them. But OS X doesn't (yet) allow you to fork an existing shadow copy and switch between them; you'd have to do the convert line first to merge your shadow changes back, and then create a new shadow copy.

Those are very useful suggestions. Thank you. The additional detail at the end suggests that this idea may be impractical in its present form, and would (it seems) cause a long delay every time a different user started up SheepShaver. Instead of going this route, it would surely be easier simply to install the application in each user's home folder, so that each user gets a copy of the boot disk. Disk space is cheap enough now to make this practical.

Again, thank you for the full details!

The startup would be quick; the only delay would be when writing out a new user's full disk image. But if you're planning on hiding it all, you could just write the shadow file to ~/Library/Application Data/SheepShaver/HD.shadow and read/write that on each launch/close. That way, if someone copies the app, they're just copying your original image with no changes, but each user gets to use their own changes. And to revert to a "clean" copy of the image, they just have to trash HD.shadow.

That sounds very plausible. Thank you for the details!

I've now updated the macOS version of this complete, prebuilt SheepShaver/macOS 9.0.4 system with many improvements. You can find it by searching for



(The forum does not allow direct links to prebuilt systems like this one.)

I was prompted to update the system after reading another thread started by a forum member who wanted to mount a CD image under SheepShaver. With the current version of this system, if you want to use a CD image for installing software or games, you can now drop a CD image on the application and it will prompt you to add it to the system. Choose the option to leave the image where it is and link it to the system. When you restart the system, the CD image will be on the SheepShaver desktop. Open the image and install the software.

To remove the CD image from the SheepShaver desktop, shut down the Mac OS 9 app, and move, rename, or delete the CD image. When you restart the Mac OS 9 app, the image will no longer be on the desktop.

Also, this system uses a SheepShaver build that does not have a working Preference pane, so no one will waste time setting preferences that the system doesn't use. Instead, hold down the Option key when launching the application for a menu of options, including one that leads to the basic "sharedprefs" file that the system uses to build a prefs file each time it starts.

Incidentally, the SheepShaver build in this system is based on current code, but with the Preferences pane replaced by a message explaining what to use instead.

Now updated with a build made from the new code by kanjitalk755 that creates a 64-bit SheepShaver. Same download page as before.

And now updated again with kanjitalk755's latest improvements, with linear scaling and nearest-integer scaling turned on by default.

The Windows version still seems to be the December 2018 release and not the newer March 2019 version. Has the Windows version been updated?

No, but you can probably update the copy of SheepShaver.exe inside the application with the newer version. If that works, could you please let us know? I don't see any reason why it won't work, but I haven't tried it. I prefer to build SheepShaver myself (with a better icon) and simply haven't got around to doing it.

Where do I find the download?

Hmm.... I was mistaken. The latest build on this forum is from 2015, and hasn't been updated. As far as I know, no one has built the Windows version of the latest code, or at least no one has publicly posted a Windows build of that version. The most recent publicly-available build seems to be the one that you have, the one in my Mac OS 9 system.

If you're interested, you could easily build the latest code yourself. Instructions are on kanjitalk755's GitHub page, which you can very easily find via Google. If you do build it, please let us know.

I might get around to updating the build sometime this summer, but not before then.

I'll just wait until you get around to it.

Actually, I looked at my setup, and the Windows-based Sheepshaver in it dates from 2017. I forgot that current code won't build with JIT enabled, so it's far too slow to use in the real world. So please ignore everything I said about making a new Windows build. Until JIT works in Windows builds, there's no reason to build one.

I've updated the Mac version of the Mac OS 9 app. The disk image now has 2.8 GB of available space. If that's not enough, there's an option (accessible by holding down the Option key on launch) to use a second disk image with 3.7 GB of free space. That should be enough for most purposes. The second disk image is a sparsebundle, so it only takes up around 26 MB inside the app until you start adding files to it.

The option to enable the second disk image is per-user, so if you're using this in a multiuser system, each user will have to enable the option to mount the second disk image.

I've updated the Windows version of this so that the built-in disk is a 4GB image instead of 1GB as it was before. I've also added instructions (on the web page about the system) that explains how to add additional disk images in case you need more space. Again, you can find the web page for this by searching:

Mac OS 9 for Windows

Forum rules forbid me to post a direct link, because the file contains a full System 9.0.4 setup. Again: Apple's PR department knows where to find me if their legal department has any problem with this.