Month: February 2007

Sheepshaver and the Intel Mac

I’m a little behind the bandwagon on this, but I haven’t had the need to mess around with OS 9x on an Intel Mac. Now I do.

We recently got new computers for the paleo lab, one of which is a mac. The mac was purchased so that we could run PAUP*. Unfortunately for us, no one checked to make sure PAUP* would run on an Intel Mac. It will not, and I hope they get around to fixing that soon.

Anyway, I am currently trying to install Mac OS 9.0 on this new Mac Mini. Rather than spell out the instructions here, I will direct you to some better tutorials:

—Run MacOS 9 on an Intel Mac
—How to use TomeViewer

Extracting the ROM image from my current installation of OS 9 as Classic on my Powerbook G4 was simple, as was setting up the new volume to emulate the PowerPC chip on the Intel Mac.

Installation of OS 9.0 initially has gone smoothly. One thing that the first tutorial above does not mention is that you will get a “disk is unreadable” notice when you start up SheepShaver to install OS 9. Don’t worry, it’s just asking about the new disk image you just created, not about the rest of your hard drive.

I had a couple false starts. The first time I installed OS 9, it made it nearly to the end of the installation and told me I didn’t have enough free space, even though it had said that 200 MB was good enough. I increased this to 400 MB, and I’m waiting on results.

Problems: The first time I attempted OS 9 installation, SheepShaver just quit, so I restarted it and it worked fine (except for the memory problem). I increased the memory to 400 MB and tried again. SheepShaver quit out at the beginning of installation (the part where the progress bar has barely started to move) numerous times.

I think the cause of this problem was running SheepShaver from the “Start” command in the GUI, after which the GUI did not quit entirely and messed something up. This persisted through a restart and a new virtual 400 MB disk, but this last time it worked when I quit out of the GUI and started the SheepShaver program properly manually.

UPDATE: It seems to be installed. 400 MB was enough. I’ll see what I can install now that will work.

UPDATE: PAUP* installs, but I am not a PAUP* user. I will try convince someone to test it out, since PAUP* is the reason we got this new machine in the first place.

UPDATE: Since there has been some confusion, this post refers to running PAUP* with a GUI. There is a version of PAUP* that will run on an Intel Mac from the command line.

UPDATE (again!): Cool reader Ricardo (in the comments to this post) has pointed out a trial version of a GUI PAUP* for the Intel Mac. I have installed it, opened it up, and that’s about it. It opens fine in Tiger (10.4), but my PAUP*-using colleagues have not attempted to run anything on it. UPDATE: This version has expired; I have not been able to get it to work using devious means.