[B2-devel] Thoughts on SheepShaver and Basilisk II

[howard s. <how...@ho...>]

Hi all,

The sudden increase in activity on this ML makes for interesting 
reading. It looks like the development community is looking for an 
agenda? We, the maintainers of the http://www.emaculation.com
 website have ample experience in why and how SheepShaver is used by 
various groups of users. And have ample experience in what its 
shortcomings are. So, we would like to chime in from the user 
perspective.

First of, something about importance: In the 
discussion these past days, someone suggested that SheepShaver is not 
all that important because much old software can be run in Mini vMac. 
This is certainly not true for those who use SheepShaver on an Intel 
Mac, by far the largest group of SheepShaver users. After the demise of 
the Classic environment and later Rosetta, SheepShaver is the only way 
left to run Mac OS applications on an emulated PowerPC processor. Many 
Mac users simply need SheepShaver to keep some old applications running 
or to have access to files in formats that are not supported by today's 
Mac software. SheepShaver became a necessary tool that, as we know from 
the forum discussions and support questions, in some cases is even used 
to run irreplaceable software that is vital to professionals, 
businesses, or scientists.

Someone called SheepShaver a niche 
product. While that in itself is true, we feel that some tender love and
 care (including some expansion in the feature set) could make it a bit 
less “nichy”. Looking around the Internet, one finds many failed attempts at getting SheepShaver running, or when it does run not providing the desired functionality.
A point we would like to make is that we, as volunteer supporters/build providers, are not in favour of a diverging 
code base for the supported platforms.

Towards a better feature set for all supported hosts: 
-Improved CD/DVD handling. 
-USB support. 
-Video acceleration on the host. 
-Memory management allowing running Mac OS above 9.0.4. 
-More opcodes supported, allowing more applications to work. (Office comes to mind). 
-Improve networking, including Appletalk. 
-Improve communication to serial/parallel ports.
-A
 possibility to launch a SheepShaver built-in preferences editor without
 the emulator starting (by holding a modifier key?). That would make a 
separate external preferences editor superfluous.
-Improve SCSI support.

Specific for OSX: 
-Clipboard exchange for text in 64-bit mode SheepShaver (it currently doesn’t work at all in 64-bit mode.) 
-Possibility to compile/build SheepShaver in MacOSX 10.7.x (Lion) and future versions. 
-Solution
 to the weird color problems on Intel Mac after SheepShaver window has 
been minimized or hidden and is brought back in view. (Possibly a SDL 
issue.)

Specific for Windows: 
-Replace the reliance on the cdenable.sys cd rom driver for CD support. It currently doesn’t work on 64-bit hosts. 
-Replace
 the reliance on the BasiliskII Ethernet driver with for example 
WinPcap, as it currently doesn’t run on 64-bit hosts (requiring driver 
signing).
-Replace reliance on Cygwin to build for Windows.

Best regards,
Ronald P. Regensburg and Howard Spoelstra