Forums | MacLife

I used SheepShaver to run a few games a few months ago.  You'll need a ROM from an OS 9 Mac to run anything.  There's one available from Apple, but you'll need an OS 9 environment to extract it from the archive they provide.  There are instructions available at http://emaculation.com/sheepshaver.php

Oh, of course you'll also need the OS as well

aside from part of the computer's resources still need to go to the host? probably pretty good, as it isn't using Rosetta.

Right, that may be too broad in range for what I need to know. Instead, 1) how good is the performance relative to the normal speed of the machine it's installed on – an Intel 2 GHZ for example. 2) Is it going to be good enough for games (Quake) and graphics programs (Photoshop and Illustrator) for example - or is it gonna drag even on a 2 GHZ. Intel?

Last edited by adamjg (2007-12-14 12:49 pm)

Want to use SheepShaver mainly for Classic apps 'cause Rosetta's built in already for OS X apps and I'm assuming Rosetta's faster than SheepShaver anyway.

So using SheepShaver for older classic 3-D Games (but don't want to re-purchase new versions: Quake, Ghost Recon, Rogue Spear, etc.) that still need a minimal hardware robustness to play well (i.e. much better than a 60 MHZ 601 PPC). Is that going to fly with this scheme?

Last edited by adamjg (2007-12-14 2:21 pm)

Mr. T wrote:

SheepShaver is quite a bit slower than Rosetta.  I ran MacBench 5 in Sheepshaver on my P4 hacktosh, and I'm getting performance around a 200MHz G3 when I average the integer and FPU scores (FPU scores were notably poor).  Running Xbench in Rosetta, I get results comparable to a 600MHz G3. But anyway, it's roughly 1/3 the speed of Rosetta; Rosetta, in turn, is roughly 1/3 (this varies widely) native.

That's kinda what I expected. Crap.

Mr. T wrote:

More to the point, some of those games you mention need hardware graphics acceleration which SheepShaver does not support.  However, there is an OS X version of Quake, and there's probably a free OS X update for Ghost Recon.  You should check your other games as well...you may get lucky.

no hardware accel – that's not good.

And the fact that the Intel is a dual core or quad core (2-3 GHZ) doesn't compensate by giving any better performance than a mid-range '90s PPC?

Mr. T wrote:

Failing that, you might be able to "convert" the game to a Windows version by replacing the game application file with the executable from a Windows demo version of the same game.

Reeeally. I had no idea you could do that.


Thanks all!

Last edited by adamjg (2007-12-14 5:09 pm)

Mr. T wrote:

adamjg wrote:

And the fact that the Intel is a dual core or quad core (2-3 GHZ) doesn't compensate by giving any better performance than a mid-range '90s PPC?

You're only using one core in SheepShaver, so not really.  On your machine, you might get something roughly comparable to a 250 or 300MHz G3 (tops).  That might be good enough for the games you mentioned, but you're still missing graphics acceleration.

It sounds perfectly suitable for something like Virtual Game Station, tho...


Of course, the Playstation itself used something like a 60mhz 601 with 64mb of RAM.
Does SheepShaver have optical drive support? If it came down to that, you could always spoof with a disk image.