Trash ALL cubase preferences BEFORE re-installing, that should fix the "crash when launching" Symptom'

Also we have Cubase 5 (score also) that will authorize if you burn an actual CD from the image, then you can open version 4 projects

I'll try it, but in my experience, bit shifts and bit fields are slow.

Bit shifts are only slow on interpreters.

On physical hardware they're always the fastest or as fast as the alternatives.

In reality they're often faster as all other operands are implemented as shifts and combinational bitwise logic in a CPU.

For example masking the character with 0xF instead of subtracting 48 might not be faster on all machines but there shouldn't be a single instance where its slower.
It doesn't set any condition bits and in some it might event fuse into a shift with mask instruction (when used in this context).

AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) is a sound only format.

SDII (Sound Designer II) has two forks: one for sound one for the graphics.

Bias uses their own PROPRIETARY version of AIFF which adds a graphics fork, which is saved so that the visuals don't have to be recreated every time an AIFF file is opened in a Bias application.

Toast and Jam seemed to be able to handle this special AIFF, but other applications may not.

Another quirk of Bias AIFF is that when saving a small change, say adding a marker, the whole file gets rewritten and the same save takes MUCH longer than when working in SDII format.

We acquired it in 2014, but Camel Audio was still in business, at this point they are not, so we are assuming that this dead-end legacy software for OS 9 is now defunct; if we get notified to pull it, then we will comply.

http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php/topic,4463.0.html

We can always post all your finished products here... let me know since I am fixing all downloads