SheepShaver is an open source PowerPC Apple Macintosh emulator
18 comments
·March 16, 2025deviantintegral
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.
watersb
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.
flashman
macintosh.js is an alternative that runs as an Electron app https://github.com/felixrieseberg/macintosh.js
duskwuff
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.)
turnsout
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.
cosmic_cheese
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.
tengbretson
For Tiger and beyond wouldn't the hackintosh images in VirtualBox give you what youre looking for?
compton93
PearPC?
scarface_74
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
card_zero
I was playing Ambrosia games on SheepShaver last year or so. Not sure where I got them from, but probably here:
tpmoney
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.
ranger_danger
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.
NegativeLatency
Might also be able to use the "classic environment" from older mac os versions (in an emulator)
TuringNYC
Here I thought it was a shearer emulator for aspiring farmers!
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.