[Felipe Maldonado]

Has someone installed Sheepsaver or another emulator to run OS9 applications on OS 10.5?

[CharlesS]

SheepShaver's a bit of a mixed bag:

Pros:

- It works, sorta

- It's fast (as long as you turn the JIT compiler on)

Cons:

- It's unstable, and crashes a lot

- Lots of apps refuse to launch

- It's a bit of a pain to set up

- You need to have precisely the right version of the Mac OS ROM, and you also need a copy of Mac OS 9.0.4 (9.1 and up won't work)

Note: you want to use the latest unofficial build found at this forum. The latest official build is extremely old and is even buggier than the unofficial builds.

[Horsepoo!!!]

SheepShaver is the only available solution. Cons or not, we have to live with it. As CharlesS has already said, go with the latest unofficial builds. From now on there will only be unofficial builds unless Gwenole has a change of heart on the matter.

[Big Mac]

Or keep a Classic capable Mac around.

[-Q-]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

Or keep a Classic capable Mac around.

I'd vote for that one. I tried sheepshaver one weekend b/c I wanted to fire up an old app. A few hours later, I'd made little progress other than pulling out my hair in frustration at the crashing. On a positive note, my wife likes the new bald look.

[CharlesS]

Well, to be fair, the crashing has gotten better in the latest unofficial builds, although it's still not what I'd call stable. Keeping an old Mac around is obviously a workable solution, but this takes up extra space in your apartment and can be a pain if you want to transfer files back and forth between the OS X and Classic environments. You've also got the problem that parts of the old Mac might start to deteriorate as it gets old (particularly the screen if it's a laptop).

If you do go with keeping an old Mac, make sure not to upgrade it to Leopard, because for some &@#% reason Apple decided to remove Classic support even on PPC Macs that should be able to run Classic just fine.