SheepShaver, OS 9 and old games...

[Don Luca]

Hi everyone.

 

I have a 24" iMac Core 2 Duo and I decided to try SheepShaver with OS 9.0.4.

Everything runs smooth and quite fast, but when it comes to games... then it's a bit slow...

 

For example, in Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis the music stutters and that's a pity because I love the simple little musics Indy has...

 

Also, in Prince of Persia, the movements of the Prince are slow and not as smooth as they should be...

I'd also like to try Starcraft, since the OSX version doesn't work properly and MDK, but if Indy, which is a rather old game, is slow, then i can imagine how slow a more modern game can be...

 

Does anyone have tricks to make SheepShaver go faster?

 

I discovered that SheepShaver emulates a 100 Mhz G4 PPC... is there any way to pump the frequence?

 

Thanks in advance!

[cat_7]

Hi,

 

To beef up the graphic performance you could try to play with the value for the window refresh rate in the configuration editor. Set it lower to get less sluggish performance.

About the general speed: there is nothing you can do, SheepShaver runs as fast as it can on your hardware.

[Overdriven]

++ You can't forget, since you're on an Intel, it is still having to emulate the PowerPC processor. (My G4 Laptop can run SheepShaver at native speeds, but still, games do not perform too well.) Someday, it'll be full speed, someday. I know SheepShaver emulates QuickDraw fully, but that probably isn't enough for some games.

 

-Neospy

[A Nonny Moose]

Aside from the novelty issue, there isn't much of a reason to run SheepShaver on a PPC Mac, as Classic handles most of everything (or at least most of everything I've thrown at it).

[pabloX]

++ You can't forget, since you're on an Intel, it is still having to emulate the PowerPC processor. (My G4 Laptop can run SheepShaver at native speeds, but still, games do not perform too well.) Someday, it'll be full speed, someday. I know SheepShaver emulates QuickDraw fully, but that probably isn't enough for some games.

 

-Neospy

 

Considering Rosetta is running PPC apps in OSX at roughly one third the speed as native, I think it is possible to run Classic OS's at roughyl that speed as well.. Perhaps Sheepshaver needs better optimization?

[cbreaker]

For most universal apps, I can force them to run under Rosetta with the little checkbox in File Info. SheepShaver.app, for some reason, won't retain this checkbox.

 

I was thinking perhaps Apple's PPC emulation was faster then SheepShaver's, but it looks like we can't find out.

[paramac]

I was thinking perhaps Apple's PPC emulation was faster then SheepShaver's, but it looks like we can't find out.

 

First, remember that SheepShaver incurs an additional overhead since it's also providing hardware emulation -- it's not just translating instructions from PPC to x86, it's emulating a whole machine.

 

Second, you might try running SheepShaver under Rosetta via the command line. For example:

 

/usr/libexec/oah/translate <subject program>

 

You might have to make use of the "-argv0" switch if SheepShaver requires command-line parameters (I don't know if it does.)

[A Nonny Moose]

It's similar to Virtual PC in that the emulation issue kills a lot of performance. Makes me wonder if the Start Trek project will see new light.

[bigeasy]

For Fate of atlantis i would download scummvm from www.scummvm.org that way you dont have to emulate any hardware and the software itself is an interpreter, rather than an emulator, so it should run nicely. it even runs great on my mobile phone!