SheepShaver is an open source PowerPC Apple Macintosh emulator | Hacker News Reader

SheepShaver is an open source PowerPC Apple Macintosh emulator

emaculation.com

139 pointsjanandonly67 comments

I use it to this day to run the "Best Books" accounting software (cut down MYOB) I bought in 1991 for the single-digit number of invoices I issue in a year. That's M68k software. Accounting doesn't change. The only thing I've had to do is change the GST rate from 12.5% to 15% in 2010.

I use print to PostScript for invoices and reports then copy them to the host machine (which these days can be anything) and PDF or print them.

In theory Basilisk II would do the job, but SheepShaver runs PowerPC software too, and a modern CPU emulating PowerPC emulating 68k is just fine.

I should try "II in a Mac" (from 1985) inside that.

I think I found MYOB but not Best Books here: https://www.macintoshrepository.org/2021-m-y-o-b-v5-0-1 Is the interface similar for Best Books? and also in color?

Hah, I actually haven't used it since I was last doing misc consulting stuff before living in Moscow in 2015-2018. I found my BestBooks folder easily enough, but had an ancient SheepShaver. Downloading an Apple Silicon-compatible build from January 2025 I replaced the app file, pointed it at a disk image, dragged the BestBooks folder in via the Unix shared folder ... and it launched right up!

Here's browsing some oooold data...

https://hoult.org/bestbooks.png

https://hoult.org/bestbooks_about.png

BestBooks is apparently an offshoot of MYOB 3, your find is MYOB 5.

You should upload it to macintoshrepository.org. It seems like it is not available anywhere else.

I also maintain a decades-old Macintosh that is kept simply for offline tax / accounting / business invoicing (USB print).

Even as a Millenial, it is extremely frustrating that modern versions of Excel/Office/&c are always trying to be so [un]helpful... auto-dates/-formatting is just such an absolute nuissance.

The day this machine dies will be one of great personal mourning / frustration.

Thanks for the emulation alternative, OP!

Word 5.1a and Excel 4 forever!

Actually I almost never use a GUI word processor, just a lot of markdown/asciidoc or simply plain text. I do use Google sheets a lot for all kinds of stupid little things -- just so convenient that it's all automatically on every computer/phone/tablet I own -- or anyone else's computer I have access to, and I can share reader or editor links with people etc.

> modern CPU emulating PowerPC emulating 68k is just fine.

I personally like to run my PowerPC 68050, 6502 NES emulator virtual python environment on the cloud, so that way you can virtual machine while you virtual machine while you virtual machine while you virtual machine while you virtual machine while you virtual machine while you virtual machine while you virtual machine.

Okay, Okay, I know what you're thinking Amazon AWS engineers, not enough virtual machines, not enough abstraction, we'll leave it to the pros for that!

The name SheepShaver is a play on ShapeShifter, which was a Mac II emulator for Amiga. I remember running an Amiga Emulator (UAE) AND Shapeshifter on top of that since it was the best Macintosh Emulation at one point in the late 90s.

RIP to the other Mac ShapeShifter: https://web.archive.org/web/20060613064350/http://unsanity.c...

There was a whole community around theming OS X in the aughts, chock full of talented designers. It all depended on ShapeShifter. MacThemes2.net was bustling, along with self-important invite-only communities like macristocracy.com.

Good times.

Gosh, I remember that so well and fondly miss it. Was a wild, whimsical time for sure. They made other fun "haxies" (as they called them) too, but ShapeShifter was always the coolest. To this day I remember my favorite was the green Aluminum Alloy theme; I liked Milk too. Somatic was wild as well!

Found a list with screenshots for those curious: https://www.mac-dvd.com/cool-mac-theme.html

I rocked CrystalClear Interface (CCI) from Musings from Mars for a good while too.

Fun fact: ShapeShifter was virtualized, not emulated, so software ran at full speed. I used it to play Myst and other games on my Amiga. Its 68060 CPU was faster than any real Mac, so programs were screamingly fast on it.

I’ve got it on my Amiga 500 with Vampire 500 accelerator (so-called 68080 MMX). Pretty sure that’s nearly the fastest native 68k Mac, even if it’s an FPGA.

PiStorm is faster but then you get into nuances of arguing over if pin compatible emulation counts or not, and if not, why would an FPGA emulation.

For a very short period of time and circumstances (Mac PPC was out but some Photoshop plugins were m68k only) an Amiga with SCSI and a 68060 was the fastest Photoshop Mac. :)

SheepShaver was originally virtualised and not emulated. The original version ran MacOS in a virtual machine on PowerPC BeOS (BeBox and Mac that ran BeOS.) Because of this it ran at full speed and was akin to the Classic environment on early MacOS X. I used to use it to run IE5 as the BeOS browser was quite poor and PowerPC never got any ports of more modern browsers. It ran really well and could be made full screen.

I read it as something completely different scanning HN

I love playing with SheepShaver (and BasiliskII and MinivMac).

I created disk images for the various 68K/PPC Mac emulators that have not just my early game sources but the compilers/tools to build them (if you're into that sort of thing).

The commercial games are here: https://github.com/EngineersNeedArt/SoftDorothy-CasadyGreene...

But I have a repo with the shareware games and two more repos of games that were never completed (and probably a third one coming when I get time to put it together). They're easy enough to find if you're interested with the above link as a starting point.

I just wanted to say that I LOVED Glider 4 when I was a kid. I had an Amiga 500 and later a 1200 but probably played Glider more than anything else, except maybe Frontier Elite 2, in my father's Macintosh LC.

Glider was very cool. Up there with Dark Castle in games I actually played.

A bit later on there were decent flight sims: FS4, Hellcats (amazing for the time), A-10 Attack!, F/A-18 Hornet, and the hardest to do well in: Flying Nightmares.

I first saw SheepShaver at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, a commercial product that enabled a Classic Mac environment on PowerPC-based BeOS hardware, the original BeBox.

These days, if you are just curious or want to relive to glory days of Apple's rise and near-death of 1990s, it might be easier to run a hosted environment such as Infinite Mac.

https://infinitemac.org/

I’m surprised nobody mentioned the Rosetta Stone that is infinitemac.org - it’s “just” compiled to JavaScript or whatever but really well done.

From their “About”: >>>Infinite Mac is a project by Mihai Parparita to make classic Mac and NeXT emulation easily accessible. It uses WebAssembly ports of Mini vMac, Basilisk II, SheepShaver, DingusPPC, and Previous to allow a broad set of System Software/Mac OS versions to run on the web.

Shortcuts to the most popular versions are available: system6.app, system7.app, kanjitalk7.app, macos8.app, and macos9.app. <<<

Edward Mendelson does an amazing job packaging Sheep Shaver with a bunch of built-in utilities and interfaces to your outer system that makes it much more usable out of the box:

https://www.mendelson.org/macos9osx.html

You can think about his work as a wrapper for Sheep Shaver with some quality of life improvements and some pre-installed software on the disk image.

It’s too bad there isn’t more momentum in the Mac emulation scene. It seems like it stalled out with SheepShaver and Basilisk II. The only new thing is “make it run in JS.”

I would love to see an emulator that could run later OS versions like Tiger.

PearPC?

qemu-ppc can run PPC versions of OS X. This is a good place to get started: https://www.emaculation.com/doku.php/qemu

I’ve personally run as new as Tiger with it. Takes a little bit to start up but after that it’s reasonably responsive.

For Tiger and beyond wouldn't the hackintosh images in VirtualBox give you what youre looking for?

> I would love to see an emulator that could run later OS versions like Tiger.

UTM.

https://github.com/utmapp/UTM

Very active new PPC emulator project https://github.com/dingusdev/dingusppc

Follow-up: Thanks for all the links, everyone! I haven't been keeping up, but it looks like there's more momentum than I realized.

Sheepshaver is great, but I've found Qemu's PPC emulation has progressed probably beyond what Sheepshaver can offer. For instance, it can run MacOS 9.2.2 and even early MacOSX PPC versions. Due to it's emulation limitations (lack of MMU), Sheepshaver has some weird incompatibilities, for instance MS Office, that you won't encounter running Qemu. On Mac, the UTM app is a great place to start!

Yeah, but QEMU has worse volume handling, etc.

Somewhat related:

Previous, an emulator of NeXT boxes.

https://previous.unixdude.net/

Those are all really old builds. Strongly recommend one of the following alternatives:

- On Mac or Linux, building version 3.6 from the SourceForge repo (r1603 is a good revision): https://sourceforge.net/projects/previous/

- Using one of my Windows builds from here: http://rhetori.ca/next/

- If you just want to gawk, see the WASM port here: https://infinitemac.org/ (also WASM ports of Basilisk II, SheepShaver, Mini vMac, and PearPC)

Wow, contributed to today!

If you need support for later versions of OS9, qemu at least works on 9.2 in my testing.

And unlike SheepShaver, Netscape/IE seems to work fine in qemu for me.

Might also be able to use the "classic environment" from older mac os versions (in an emulator)

Are there any advantages to BasiliskII/SheepShaver these days? Seems like QEMU has caught up on the Macintosh emulation side for both 68k and PPC. The only hole is early Macs which Minivmac handles quite well.

The file sharing features in Basilisk/SheepShaver are really useful, particularly if you're on a Mac host. Being able to drop files you've had archived on your computer for the last 20 years into a shared folder and open them directly on the emulated system is pretty neat.

macintosh.js is an alternative that runs as an Electron app https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js

It's an Emscripten-compiled version of Basilisk II [1], which is closely related to SheepShaver. (The two emulators target different generations of Apple hardware - Basilisk does 68k CPUs, SheepShaver does PowerPC.)

[1]: https://basilisk.cebix.net/

Wow this takes me back, but not as far as you’d expect. I remember setting this up in the biology labs at UR some ten years ago to run some legacy phylogenetic software.

Are there any ways to do some sort of upscaling for HiDPI displays? I’ve always wondered what MacOS 8 or 9 would feel like with 2x retina style rendering.

I’ve wondered the same for classic (pretty, ie Aqua) OS X. I wonder if GPU neural net upscaling as used in video games would be a good way to go.

> I’ve always wondered what MacOS 8 or 9 would feel like with 2x retina style rendering.

I'm not sure what that would even mean. Most of the UI was drawn from bitmaps - there isn't any higher resolution internal representation of e.g. a window border or a radio button.

Sounds like an opportunity to shove AI into some more products! :P

>I'm not sure what that would even mean.

What it would mean is something like hq2x, 2xSaI or similar. These algorithms are popularly for emulation of 8 and 16 bit era games consoles. The example image on this Wikipedia page is illustrative of what's possible with a deterministic algorithm:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hqx_(algorithm)

Imagine what could be possible with a well trained neural network, with knowledge of every icon, every element, and every font glyph at every bitmap size.

You can set up a Platinum theme on XFCE and have a pretty good analog (that's what I do).

No, but there's an config option to enable integer scaling. It makes things look much crisper on a high DPI display.

This is my workhorse for any kind of Macintosh retrocomputing. I've tested HTML on old browsers with it, I've opened old documents and played old games, for longer than my time using real classic Macs. For a free and open source program, it's highly dependable.

I used this to run the original Myst... on a PPC OS X iBook (I... think it was PPC. I genuinely don't remember). It worked great. Not sure about ARM64, but it should work there too.

Well, sometimes it all randomly crashed once in a while.

The iBook range was PowerPC. Initially very rounded, truly clamshell shaped, then a white curved plastic rectangle.

The MacBook was the similar-looking x86 range: plastic unibody cases.

I had the late white plastic one; I got confused, because the first x86 MacBooks looked identical.

First Mac I used in school ran Jaguar, and it was cool how it booted up an entire separate OS (Classic mode) for some of the software. I was sad when Leopard removed that, until I found SheepShaver.

If you want to go the other way and bring your old Mac to the internet, there is FujiNet. Also if you do have an old Mac, remove those old batteries, they leak destroying the motherboard.

If I could find fully functioning versions of Ambrosia’s software, I would download this in a heartbeat.

I bought every game the minute it became available back in the day.

Andrew Welch use to post here occasionally

I was playing Ambrosia games on SheepShaver last year or so. Not sure where I got them from, but probably here:

https://macintoshgarden.org/games/e?page=7

Grab the software from the Macintosh Repository and while you're there, grab the "DecoderRing": https://www.macintoshrepository.org/63637-ambrosia-software-.... The latter will require a modern(ish) mac rather than running in an older classic mac but it will generate valid license keys for any old Ambrosia software.

I tried setting up SheepShaver on a Steam Deck specifically to play Bubble Trouble (no modern-PC-compatible versions or even similar games seem to exist), but I never got it to work. The easiest way I have to play it is firing up an old iMac G3.

It looks like there was a version that worked on Classic OS and OS X.

I recall some missing dependencies or drivers stopping the game from starting in SheepShaver. I was able to resolve some, but not all of them (I remember something with "carbon" in the name). It seemed like it was a sound-related issue, but the game wouldn't start at all, I couldn't even play it muted. I may try again at some point. Maybe there's a forum where I could get some help.

Google's special relationship with Reddit says the Ambrosia website disappeared only 6 years ago. Perhaps you could try emailing the guy?

No need to download anything. You can emulate a Macintosh in your web browser and play Ambrosia games including Bubble Trouble on Infinite Mac.

https://infinitemac.org/1997/Mac%20OS%207.6

https://www.macintoshrepository.org/software_search.php?pubi...

Nice thing! I use it to let my kids play with the educational games I used to play when I was their age (mostly Sammy's Science House).

Time to fire up Tomb of the Taskmaker

I loved that game!

Here I thought it was a shearer emulator for aspiring farmers!

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