has anyone explored "sheepshaver"?

[supernova777]

i understand this is a limited virtualization of mac os 9
and is totally useless for people who want to run midi + have audio in + out
but nevertheless, curious if anyone has explored this
and if so, which platform you tried it on!
i understand it can be run on a variety of computers!

http://www.emaculation.com/doku.php
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqgw4z_r2sE[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUJznUyiA8E[/youtube]

[MacTron]

I've tested long time ago.
My opinion in short: even a cheap real mac is way better than this...
I also tried out mini vmac on android... it is just a toy like sheepshaver...

The main problem of emulators running on Intel is that Intel chips are CISC and can emulate other CISC chips like M68k more or less. But it is very hard to them emulate RISC chips like PPC.
That's why PPC can emulate easily Intel x86 chips (Virtual PC) and M68K. Even ARM chips can emultate M68k and x86.
But emulation is -between others things- very bad on Intel x86 CISC chips.

[Protools5LEGuy]

But emulation is -between others things- very bad on Intel x86 CISC chips.

Original app for BeOS http://sheepshaver.cebix.net/

After that appeared 3 versions: Windows, OSX and Linux

http://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/sheepshaver

We welcome users from sheepshaver here wishing to test any DAW in their "virtualization".

I have notice that the last OSX version

Currently recommended SheepShaver build for Mac OS X:

01 February 2014 build For PPC and Intel Mac, OSX 10.4 (Tiger) through OSX 10.9 (Mavericks)
Runs in OSX 10.10 (Yosemite), albeit only in 32-mode.

  http://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7360  run  Tiger and Leopard. We could benchmark Classic vs Sheepshaver on Tiger. Classic blue box vs Emulation (9.22 vs 9.04). Leo cant run Classic, so It could be a solution for Leo users.

I think "emulation" of RISC on RISC processor should have less penalty than emulate RISC on x86 Intel machines.  It should run nicely on OSX PowerPC . It depends on optimizations made for this version.

Look at this Win7 user handling OS9 on Intel:
[youtube]x0jFq2aJOtY[/youtube]

CPU really works at max! And can't even handle sound well.

Even a child notice loud MacBook when Emulating 
[youtube]cb6ypDPgr3U[/youtube]

There is a ready tool called C.O.I. (Classic on Intel) based on Sheepshaver that is Illegal because it has the Mac OS or the Mac OS ROM
http://emaculation.com/doku.php/classic_on_intel

[Protools5LEGuy]

I wonder if we can "hack" last MacOS ROM to be used instead the one what sheepshaver supports.

On some videos on system profiler it report as a 9500/9600 machine with 100MHz bus and a G4.

Chris, are there out older versions of sheepshaver not universal? I mean, not written to be run on Intells, for OSX PowerPC only. Maybe them are more optimized for G4s on OSX than the last universal one.

On last Sheepshaver Know Issues
http://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7360

Known issues

- On all hosts:
When you switch from window to full-screen mode using Ctrl-Return before you used the mouse cursor in the emulator at least once, you may loose the cursor. One click on the desktop or pressing the control key suffices to bring back the cursor.

- On PPC machines:
Like previous builds, very CPU hungry. Set refresh rate in SheepShaver Preferences not higher than 30Hz, preferably at 15Hz.

[supernova777]

i have ZERO interest in sheepshaver.. because with sheepshaver.. midi hardware access is not a possibility.
i was interested untill i discovered that fact and then i abandoned exploring any more info re: sheepshaver

[Veneteaou]

I used it on Windows Vista for about a year to play old games, use old apps, and generally dick around. Ultimately, it is not stable enough to use for any kind of productivity work. Applications crash left and right, the whole system will freeze, and you basically have to use trial-and-error to find optimal setups for each piece of software you want to run.

The best thing of course is OS9-compatible PPC hardware. Classic mode on an OSX PowerPC computer is a step below that. Sheepshaver, while the best of the emulators, is still a couple of steps below that.

[carguyty]

I wonder if we can "hack" last MacOS ROM to be used instead the one what sheepshaver supports.

On some videos on system profiler it report as a 9500/9600 machine with 100MHz bus and a G4.

Chris, are there out older versions of sheepshaver not universal? I mean, not written to be run on Intells, for OSX PowerPC only. Maybe them are more optimized for G4s on OSX than the last universal one.

On last Sheepshaver Know Issues
http://www.emaculation.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7360

Known issues

- On all hosts:
When you switch from window to full-screen mode using Ctrl-Return before you used the mouse cursor in the emulator at least once, you may loose the cursor. One click on the desktop or pressing the control key suffices to bring back the cursor.

- On PPC machines:
Like previous builds, very CPU hungry. Set refresh rate in SheepShaver Preferences not higher than 30Hz, preferably at 15Hz.

Please keep in mind that I'm still a student and my experience may be full of flaws.

Sheepshaver emulates a generic G4 core. That's generic from the point of view of the ISA. It's not like a 7447 or even a 74XX. One of the many headaches with emulating a chunk of hardware is finding all the instructions in one place. IBM has the ISA available for POWER but it doesn't outline the entirety of the systems in their retail form. PAPR and CHRP are mildly well documented but it doesn't identify the various packages that Motorola added to the core processor or even the final development of ANY retail logic board. The obvious omission in Sheepshaver is the Memory Management Unit. In fact this is one of the most difficult items to emulate in software. Ask the creator of Einstein. And HE'S trying to emulate an ARM on an ARM! Getting anything higher than OS 9.1 is just not going to work. Those require processors with an MMU.

Some emulators that are based in hardware (see the Big Mess O' Wires) have a little better luck. My personal opinion is that with progression in the FPGA field, improvements in software that is fully aware of system hardware, and the clever genome style of writing that a computer can perform on itself...we may be a lot closer to replacing large chunks of these specific machines with an FPGA than we will ever be with consumer grade processors.

One day I believe the world will realize the PowerPC was the better track and we will start to see it flourish again. Maybe at that time, we can see better emulation of full operating systems. I think the best bet would be to wait the 20 years for OS 9 to become abandoned and start developing it in a parallel track to fit on modern hardware (PowerPC preferred of course ;-)

[Metrophage]

I first tried SheepShaver last week when my MDD G4 wouldn't boot. I wanted to analyze some audio files with a NRT program I have, and after searching and not finding anything which would do it the same way on a modern system, I figured that it might take me less time to do it on my main OSX-Linux box.

Setup isn't too bad. It's easy if one already has Mac ROMs and OS on hand. The overhead is pretty huge on my i7 box - about 10% CPU idle to 50-100% when handling any user interaction. I doubt if it will be suitable for serious work/play, but it's handy enough if I need to quickly run an OS 9 utility and not want to set up one of my systems to do it (I don't have much room).

As for Chris' remarks above about it being useless for MIDI and audio - on MacOS it does audio straight away, but obviously not "pro audio". I did a few quick edits of 24-bit 48kHz sounds and it played fine through CoreAudio. The main problem with MIDI (besides that it would have horrendous timing) is that the project handles USB I/O by converting it all to ADB. And they assume that nearly all prospective MIDI users would be trying to use it with a USB interface. Fact is though that SheepShaver does have some vestigial serial I/O. BUT nobody has tried using it in recent memory. This part of the code has scarcely been maintained. Did it ever work? Does it now? If/when I can be arsed to try, I might hook up something relatively simple, like a printer or terminal and see if those work. Another more flexible option might be to code some sort of bridge, an abstraction layer which could appear as an OMS driver in the emulation, and act as a go-between with CoreMIDI. I wouldn't want to need to do anything tight with that setup, but it might be a workaround for SoundDiver, sample dumps, and such.

Also, I did have one program refuse to run because its copy protection didn't like how SheepShaver virtualizes HFS drives. That was Acousmographe 1.2, which complained that it needs to be installed to either a SCSI or IDE drive and finds neither. But to be fair, the program is a crap Windows port which runs poorly in the best case anyway.

[zerohour]

To be honest from past testing.  The Windows version of Sheepshaver while not difficult to setup.  It was the most unstable thing I ever used.

I thought Basilisk II was unreliable but Sheepshaver was worse.  Nine times out of ten it would hang or freeze.  Eventually the hard drive file would end up so corrupted it was not worth the hassle.

So unless it's suddenly been updated and improved I would avoid it like the plague.

[Irisman]

My opinion in short: even a cheap real mac is way better than this...
I also tried out mini vmac on android... it is just a toy like sheepshaver...

Pure true and wise words. Real gear IS always better than emulators, except FM7 & Pro53.  Same for real Atari hardware

Wavestation lacks multitimbral option...

[adespoton]

Bumping an old thread to provide some more (and newer) details.

SheepShaver achieves its speed by doing a lot of work outside the emulated environment.  This means it's fast for the vast majority of software that is only doing standard things (no GPU, no external hardware of any sort like MIDI, etc), but won't do anything else.

There are new versions of SheepShaver out now that use SDL2, and are more stable/capable, but they still have the same limitations on hardware support.  It also still only supports up to Mac OS 9.0.4.  This is not likely to change.  Useful for playing old games, transferring software to HFS disk images for old PPC computers, networking with old PPC computers.

The place to be exploring for a more realistic environment to run Mac OS 9 is QEMU-PPC.  This properly supports external hardware interfaces including USB; GPU is still a work in progress (virtual ATi Rage 128 support is ongoing, support of existing host machine Rage hardware works).

The caveat here is that you need a fast machine to get MIDI clock sync to not drift too much over time.  Real hardware is still better.

[smilesdavis]

can someone twear qemu to adress digidesign mix core and mix farm cards ?