SheepShaver not running on Windows 8.1 - Please help!

[macfan63]

I have used SheepShaver for years to emulate MacOS 9 on Windows XP and Windows 7, but I cannot make it work on Windows 8.1.

I have tried all the versions available of SheepShaver from 2006 to 2015 and also tried to change the SDL.dll, but there is no way to get it up and running. It just won´t start.

It worked very fine on Windows 7 so I tried with the the same Mac hard disk and the same Rom in Windows 8.1 - In Windows 7 I used the SheepShaver version of 630 k size ( old versión ), and SDL.dll 1.2.13, in the SheepShaverGUI configuration I used video fullscreen, width maximum, height maximum, QuickDraw acceleration, Memory 512 MB - I had "Don´t use CPU when idle" and "Ignore Illegal Memory Access" both enabled and also enabled Jit compiler.

I wonder what is the reason, maybe I changed the video driver after upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 8.1 ) ( my graphic card is Nvidia GT 430 and Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 use different drivers for this card ) - I even tried to run SheepShaver in an XP virtual machine using VMWare ( Windows XP SP2 guest inside Windows 8.1 host ), but it doesn´t run either on the virtual machine -
Any help please ?

[ClockWise]

Are you getting a particular error message? If not, you may begin by checking the paths to your ROM and hard disk images.

Post your prefs file and we can take a look for possible errors.

[macfan63]

Thanks for responding.

Strangely today I made a couple of changes in the SheepShaverGUI and it now works fine !

I mainly changed the CD drive and disabled sound in the GUI, maybe that was preventing the program from starting !

[Cat_7]

Are you now using the latest build for 2015? Can you please post the contents of your preferences file? It could be of interest for others.

I'll remove you duplicate post from the SheepShaver for Windows thread.

Best,
Cat_7

[macfan63]

I am using an old versión of SheepShaver on Windows 8.1 ( size 630 k and I think it is from year 2006 ), I did not try the new 2015 versión but I think it will work fine, as I realized my problem was that I chose the wrong letter for my CD Rom drive when configuring SheepShaverGUI, and that was the reason SheepShaver refused to run.

My SheepShaver_prefs are the following:

disk D:\SISTEMAS\MAC\SheepShaver\MacOS9
cdrom F:\
extfs
screen dga/0/0
windowmodes 3
screenmodes 63
seriala COM1
serialb COM2
rom D:\SISTEMAS\MAC\SheepShaver\Mac OS ROM
bootdrive 0
bootdriver 0
ramsize 1073741824
frameskip 1
gfxaccel true
nocdrom false
nonet false
nosound false
nogui false
noclipconversion false
ignoresegv true
ignoreillegal false
jit true
jit68k false
keyboardtype 5
ether slirp
keycodes false
mousewheelmode 1
mousewheellines 3
ignoresegv true
idlewait true
keycodes false
mousewheelmode 1
mousewheellines 3
enableextfs false
debugextfs false
extdrives CDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
pollmedia true
etherpermanentaddress true
ethermulticastmode 0
routerenabled false
ftp_port_list 21
portfile0 C:\B2TEMP0.OUT
portfile1 C:\B2TEMP1.OUT

[macfan63]

Well, I remember I tried once the 2015 versión when I was trying to fix my problem, but as the problem was not the SheepShaver exe file but the CD rom drive letter configuration in the GUI, I think the 2015 versión of SheepShaver will work.

all the best