After all, running Classic Mode programs is what this is all about!Ī hunt online got me a number of dead ends but eventually led me to a downloadable “New World PPC ROM”. But TomeViewer is a Classic Mode program – if all you’ve got is an Intel Mac or a PowerPC Mac with Leopard (which is my situation), you can’t make it work. The recommended way is to use a utility called TomeViewer. Apple has a Mac OS ROM Update available online that is also supposed to be usable in this way, but you need to be able to extract the ROM image from the software installer. It didn’t work for me – all I got was a black screen when I tried to start up SheepShaver. But you may want to emulate a PowerPC Mac because you don’t have access to an actual running computer of that era.Īlternatively, the firmware updater file included in the Mac OS 8.5 or 8.6 CD (in the System Folder) is supposed to be usable as a ROM image. If you have access to a PowerPC Mac from that late 1990s era, you could, presumably, make an image using the ROM Grabber utility. You need the ROM image in order to allow your emulated Mac to start the boot process – where standard Windows-style PCs have fairly simple ROM BIOSes, PowerPC Macs need access to a hunk of Apple-written (and Apple copyright) code before they start to load the operating system. In order to make it work, you need to download a copy appropriate for your hardware and operating system, have handy a copy of the Mac operating system (versions 7.5.2 through 9.0.4 – and not a copy that’s tied to a specific piece of hardware), and access to a Mac ROM image. SheepShaver is an open source project designed to emulate Power Mac hardware with versions for Mac OS X, Linux, Windows, and more. So I thought it might be time to give SheepShaver another look. I recently bought a secondhand 12″ G4 PowerBook (more on that another time) it came with Mac OS X 10.4 installed, but I upgraded it to 10.5, thus nuking its Classic Mode capabilities. But now, if you’ve upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, your PowerPC Mac will also be Classic-less. At that time, if you had a PowerPC Mac, you could still run older software in Classic Mode if needed. While many of us no longer rely on old Classic mode software, Apple gives Classic mode even less support than at the time I wrote that article. While SheepShaver, promising emulation of Macs from the late 1990s, would seem a better solution than Basilisk – emulating Macs from the 1980s through early 1990s – I noted in that article: “I’ve been trying to make (SheepShaver) work.

In it, I noted that the then-new Intel-powered Macs were unable to run older Mac software in called Classic Mode, but that there were at least a couple of ways to get around that, including Basilisk II, which emulates old 680×0 Macs, and SheepShaver, which emulates newer pre-OS X PowerPC Macs. Early in 2006, I wrote an article for Low End Mac entitled VNC, Basilisk II, and SheepShaver: 3 Ways to Run Classic on an Intel Mac.

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