Which Emulator?

Anything about Mac emulation that does not belong in the above categories.

Moderators: Cat_7, Ronald P. Regensburg

Post Reply
MitchellMartin
Student Driver
Posts: 10
Joined: Mon Jan 14, 2013 2:57 am

Which Emulator?

Post by MitchellMartin »

Hello all,

For professional reasons, I just purchased a Mac Mini M1 to join the 64-bit world. I would also like to be able to use it for four programs from the PowerPC era, that I still need:

Managing Your Money (Best personal-finance program ever)
Apple Works
Address Book
Strategic Conquest (Just a game, but I like it).

For almost a decade, I've been running the last three on a Mid-2013 MacBook Pro that I stopped updating at High Sierra, and I run Managing Your Money on an ancient 12-inch iBookG4 running 10.4.11. The MacBook -- which has the Chubby Bunny version of Sheepshaver for the OS9 stuff, still works well for the other three programs, but the iBook is taking up valuable desk space and is limited in its ability to print things.

All of those programs run fine under any version of OS9, including Classic, though I'd prefer to have AppleWorks on OSX.

There seem to be several possibilities for emulators/virtualizers out there, and I gave a bunch of the ones available via Emaculation as well as UTM a try today, but I wasn't successful with getting any of them to run Managing Your Money.

The one that came the closest was Emendelson's package, which was easy to download and use with what was there, but items aren't transferring from the Shared folder on the M1 Mini's side to the Unix folder in OS9. On the MacBook, even when I was successful in getting the program across, it wouldn't access the data files, and the whole point is to be able to use the same financial-tracking data that goes back to the mid-1990s. That's why I still have the G4.

The other things I tried: Sheepshaver directly and UTM just didn't work. I know you guys work hard on these things, but the instructions for Sheepshaver don't match what I see or what happens, and some of them are way over my heard (I'm still pretty sure Root is Amy Acker). UTM didn't address how to get programs into it and sent me to Discord for help, and it just looked like a bunch of people asking very specific questions that weren't my questions, and there was no way to search the chat.

For what it's worth, I have an old 9.04 disk image and a ROM, and I have physical CDS for the store-bought version of OS9, Snow Leopard Server, and Tiger. Since the MacBook has a disk drive -- I bought it because it was the last one that did -- I think I should be able to make disk images, though I don't know how that works when there are multiple disks.

So what I need are two things: the best approach for being able to use all my old programs on my new computer, preferably in OSX but also preferably with sound, and then some specific help in installing that.

Thanks.
User avatar
Ronald P. Regensburg
Expert User
Posts: 7821
Joined: Thu Feb 09, 2006 10:24 pm
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Re: Which Emulator?

Post by Ronald P. Regensburg »

MitchellMartin wrote: Sun Jul 03, 2022 1:38 am The one that came the closest was Emendelson's package, which was easy to download and use with what was there, but items aren't transferring from the Shared folder on the M1 Mini's side to the Unix folder in OS9.
If you tried emendelson's Mac OS 9 application, read the "How to use it" instructions on the "Mac OS 9 for OS X/macOS" page. Transferring files between host and guest works differently from a regular SheepShaver setup (and from Chubby Bunny that you are used to).

To transfer a file from macOS to Mac OS 9, drop the file on to Mac OS 9 app. After a few seconds, the file should be copied to the Mac OS 9 desktop. The original file remains on your macOS host system.

To transfer a file to macOS from Mac OS 9, use the standard SheepShaver method of dropping the file into the Mac OS 9 Unix folder; a copy of the file will appear in your macOS Documents folder.
emendelson
Forum All-Star
Posts: 1706
Joined: Tue Oct 14, 2008 12:12 am

Re: Which Emulator?

Post by emendelson »

MitchellMartin wrote: Sun Jul 03, 2022 1:38 am The one that came the closest was Emendelson's package, which was easy to download and use with what was there, but items aren't transferring from the Shared folder on the M1 Mini's side to the Unix folder in OS9.
My Mac OS 9 package doesn't use any folder called "Shared." The Unix folder in that setup is your macOS Documents folder. (But you can change this by holding down the Option key when launching the package.)

Also, although my page doesn't say it explicitly, you can move a file to SheepShaver from macOS to SheepShaver by copying the file into your macOS Documents folder, then, in SheepShaver, dragging that file to a folder in the SheepShaver setup (NOT to the SheepShaver Desktop). The "File Transfer" folder on the SheepShaver desktop is a convenient place to drag to.
MitchellMartin
Student Driver
Posts: 10
Joined: Mon Jan 14, 2013 2:57 am

Re: Which Emulator?

Post by MitchellMartin »

Thank you both for those rapid responses. I made some progress.

As to the file transfers, I tend to take things literally, perhaps too literally. So when it says "drop the file on to Mac OS 9 app," I see three possibilities:

1. Drag the file to the Mac OS9 icon in the Applications folder
2. Drag the file to the Mac OS9 icon in the Tool Bar
3. Drag the file to the desktop of an opened Mac OS9 program

Since none of these work, I'm guessing it means something else, but nothing in my liberal arts education equips me to figure that out.

Professor Mendelson's alternative, however, was great. I was able to move the programs and associated materials into a folder that appeared inside the MIni’s Documents Folder called "SendToMacOS9" and it showed up on the Unix folder in the emulator.

I went 2-for-4 in getting the applications to work.

1. Address Book runs fine. I somehow got two copies of one of its ancillary files stuck in the trash, and I can't figure out how to force it to empty. (I thought it was shift-Empty Trash but apparently that's OSX). It froze a few times at the start but now seems stable.

2. Strategic Conquest runs but very slowly (like System 7 slowly) and the sound tends to turn off. Not a big deal, but indicative of a difference from the Chubby Bunny/MacBook installation, where it runs super fast.

3. Apple Works refuses to open because the system sees it as an OSX file. I had this problem a few years ago on the MacBook and stumbled across a solution ( viewtopic.php?t=10371 ) but that won’t work here because whenever I try to transfer a disk image I made from my physical Apple Works 6.2.4 CD to a thumb drive it transfers an alias instead. There are instructions on the Internet about curing this by “restoring” the file with Disk Utility, but they don’t seem to work.

To get the disk image to the emulator, I tried networking the Mini (Monterey) to the MacBook (High Sierra) but I can only do it in one direction — I can read the MacBook from the Mini but I can’t log into the Mini from the MacBook, it doesn’t like my password, the same one I use to log into the Mini directly. When I look in the MacBook from the Mini, I see the DMG file but not the disk image that I made from it (not even the alias). The DMG won’t open in Mac OS9 because it doesn’t have “a recognized file type.”

4. Managing Your Money opens and runs, but OS 9 doesn’t see the data files, which are generated by the program (each year you create a new file). Somebody else has had this problem and Ronald seems to have been able to resolve it, but I don’t understand the instructions: viewtopic.php?t=7578

I’m additionally disadvantaged because I never used Monterey before Friday, and it seems to have thrown up some roadblocks — like the alias-instead-of-image thing — that are new.

Thanks again for whatever help you can provide and that already offered.
emendelson
Forum All-Star
Posts: 1706
Joined: Tue Oct 14, 2008 12:12 am

Re: Which Emulator?

Post by emendelson »

MitchellMartin wrote: Mon Jul 04, 2022 6:27 pm
As to the file transfers, I tend to take things literally, perhaps too literally. So when it says "drop the file on to Mac OS 9 app," I see three possibilities:

1. Drag the file to the Mac OS9 icon in the Applications folder
2. Drag the file to the Mac OS9 icon in the Tool Bar
3. Drag the file to the desktop of an opened Mac OS9 program
"Drop the file on to the Mac OS 9 app" means your item 1. You must drop the file on to the icon that is labeled Mac OS 9 in a Finder window, in other words, "the Mac OS 9 app."

2. I don't know what you mean by the Tool Bar. If you mean the Dock, then this will not work. The icon on the dock is labeled SheepShaver, not Mac OS 9 (move your mouse pointer over it to see its label).

3 will not work.

I have now spelled this out in exhaustive detail on my page; press Ctrl-R to refresh the page in your browser. If there is anything unclear or capable of any conceivable misinterpretation, please let me know.

I can't imagine why method 1 didn't work for you. It always works here and it seems to work for everyone else who uses this app. Perhaps you might try it again?

EDIT: Perhaps you tried to install an incompatible version of AppleWorks. There's an installer for a compatible version, already provided in the Mac OS 9 system. It works perfectly. You don't need to use a disk image (and I'm completely baffled by your description of the problem, because a DMG file is a disk image). But none of this matters because you can use the installer that I provided with the system.
MitchellMartin
Student Driver
Posts: 10
Joined: Mon Jan 14, 2013 2:57 am

Re: Which Emulator?

Post by MitchellMartin »

Thanks again. The drag-and-drop DOES work, but your suspicion was correct, I was using my version of Apple Works, and the system didn't like that specific application. Other programs transferred as you said they would (and, yes, tool bar = dock; tool bar and task bars are apparently Windows terms).

I found the AppleWorks installer in a folder called "Apple Internal" inside the "Installers" folder. Again, being terribly literal-minded, I looked in the Applications folder to see if AppleWorks was there, and since it had ClarisWorks I figured that was the latest version of that kind of application.

I installed AppleWorks, and it seems fine. The printer put a couple of lines down the left side of a word processing page, but I can probably figure out how to get rid of that. I'm curious to know if there's a way to specify which paper source the printer will use; this version wanted me to use the open sheaf at the back rather than the cassette, which is a little inconvenient though not a dealbreaker.

So with your help, I now have 3 of my 4 programs working in this brave new world.

Thanks!

P.S. The thing with the DMG file is that working in High Sierra with a physical disk and Disk Utility to make a disk image, I made a DMG file that looked like a hard drive and seemed like it was compressed. When I clicked on it, a new file opened with an icon that looked like an external drive, and that seemed to be the actual AppleWorks disk image. Every time I tried to copy that disk image onto a thumb drive or through the network to my new computer, the thumb-drive icon turned into an alias. I did some Google searching, and this is something that has happened to other people, but I didn't see a workaround.

P.P.S. I think you have idiot-proofed your instructions, but I think they could be shortened like this, adding the bold and omitting the italics:

To transfer a file from macOS to Mac OS 9, drop the file on to the icon of the Mac OS 9 app, which is usually in your computer's main Applications folder in other words, drop it on to the icon with the label Mac OS 9, which the same icon that you double-clicked in order to start the app. Use the icon that you find in a Finder window (for example, a Finder window for your Applications folder) or your desktop, depending on where the application is. (Do not drop the file on to any icon that you see in the Dock. Do not drop the file into the open Mac OS 9 window. Only drop it on the icon of the application itself.) After a few seconds, the file should be copied to the Mac OS 9 desktop. The original file remains on your macOS host system.

My problem was that the system didn't accept the specific program I used, and it didn't occur to me that there might be something wrong with that, since it was an off-the-shelf program sold for Systems 8 and 9. That's why I started looking for other meanings of "on the Mac OS app."
emendelson
Forum All-Star
Posts: 1706
Joined: Tue Oct 14, 2008 12:12 am

Re: Which Emulator?

Post by emendelson »

I forgot that I had already installed a copy of ClarisWorks in the Applications folder - thank you for reminding me. That copy works perfectly, but AppleWorks is a later version.

I had already updated my instructions page yesterday; if you go back to the page, please press Cmd-R to refresh it to the current version.

As for copying something that turns into an alias when copied: compress the file and copy the compressed archive.

I'm sure you'll be able to solve your remaining problems easily. If there's anything that can't get solved, please create a new discussion thread with a title that describes the specific problem.
MitchellMartin
Student Driver
Posts: 10
Joined: Mon Jan 14, 2013 2:57 am

Re: Which Emulator?

Post by MitchellMartin »

Hi, thanks for the assistance. Instructions look good.

I actually did solve my major remaining problem, putting the solution here in case somebody else has the same issue:

The "file kind" for my annual data documents in Managing Your Money showed up as "Document" when I did Get Info, and the application couldn't see those files. One sample file that did open, however, showed "MYM 7.2 Document", and that led me to look for ways to change the file kind. I found the answer here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/74 ... 9707864022 It requires the use of ResEdit, with which I was slightly familiar, and the trick is to make the "type" field read DAT7 and "creator" MYMd -- both were blank in my annual documents. You have to be careful that there aren't any stray spaces in those boxes in ResEdit.

With that change, Managing Your Money works fine, with the small inconvenience that I can't specify the paper source on my printer and it defaults to the inconvenient back feed rather than the cassette in front. But that's not a deal breaker.

Thanks again.
Post Reply