Mac Emulation Benchmarks

(updated October 10, 2010)

Contained here are some benchmark tests of various emulated environments. These have all been submitted by readers. Please feel free to e-mail me your own results.

Regular contributor kataetheweirdo sent this benchmark report:

These screenshots show ZD MacBench 3.0(the first screenshot) and 5.0(the second one) running under Sheepshaver.
For MacBench 5, I got 200% once for the FPU test (which is rather interesting to the least). I should also note
that in the (Quickdraw) graphics tests for MacBench 5, I kept getting 100%, even on functions that Sheepshaver
had acceleration for.

Notice how there is no screenshots for ZD MacBench 4 (oooh... irony...), since it would freeze during the intro
screen and was unable to run the benchmarks. I waited at least 20 minutes or so before giving up.

This is running under Sheepshaver (May 5th, 2010 build) on an Intel Core i7 2.67 GHz. The guest OS is Mac OS
9.0.4.

Here are the screenshots referenced:

E-Maculation reader William wrote in to say:

I'm getting wonderful Sheepshaver performance on my 2 GHz Intel iMac. I thought you might like to look at these
Norton benchmarks (below).

MacOS X-10.4.11
Sheepshaver 2.3
MacOS 9.0.4

System is listed in Norton System Info as a 424MHz CPU and tests at  approximately 12-times as fast as a Powermac
6100/60, the Norton reference system.

He contributed this screenshot:

Reader Bill provided the following:

I ran Speedometer 4.02 on my PowerMac 9500/132, with 48MB RAM, then again on my SheepShaver emulated Mac, with 512MB RAM.
The emulated edge over my old PowerMac is pretty remarkable. The final composite number is 14.296. The SS system is running
on Windows 7 64-bit (RC build 7100) with 4GB RAM and an GeForce 8800 GT card.

Included are two screenshots. The first is from the SheepShaver, the second from the 9500/132. I don't understand the
wacky numbers on the 9500. Any ideas there?

He contributed the following screenshots:

René tested SheepShaver on a PC with an Atom N270 processor. He said:

I got myself one of the last Eee's running XP home... It is [running] SheepShaver version 30.03.2006
with a german OS 8.6 and an XP home host system. By far not the fasted configuration one could get,
but pretty useful, neat and small.

He attached these screenshots:

René also sent the following report:

I am sending a screenschot of another low-end system.
It is an Intel P III 650 cpu running WIN2000 pro as a host system
for SheepShaver with OS7.6 in full screen mode 1024x768.

I collected this Wintel machine from Y2K completely from the communal
recycling area and got it to work with some recycling parts I kept from my
elderly PCs.

This configuration is running somewhat faster then my old PPC 7100/80
with sufficient performance, exept for the PS2 mouse, having been a
common draw back with old windows systems.

He attached this screenshot:

René's final SheepShaver report is as follows:

I did some tests with several OS in SheepShaver.
The hardware was always the same:
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5000+, nVidia 8100 embedded graphics
system and a 500GB SATA HD with a 500MB hardfile for SS.

It can be shown that OS7.6 is faster than the newer ones and that Linux64 is
faster than XP32, although the differences are becoming marginal with faster
machines.

He attached this screenshot:

Reader Rene sent in a screenshot of his Speedometer benchmark results. He said:

I did [a test] with Speedometer4, having been quite common in the days of 68k Macs. If someone wants the program (freeware), please
let me know and I'll send it as an email attachment.

Report of Speedometer 4.02 for:

Basilisk_II_Macintosh, Mac-OS8, 512MB RAM, Screen:800x600, 24bit

Host system: Suse Linux 11.0
Kernel:Linux 2.6.25.5-1.1-default x86_64
Hardware: AthlonX2-64, 4GB RAM, 500GB SATA2 disk, nvidia8100 chipset.

He contributed the following screenshot:

Forum member 24bit contributed these benchmarks:

The emulated Mac cpu's are : Motorola 86040 (BasiliskII) and MPC 601 (SheepShaver)
As host system for emaculation Windows2000pro or XP will be sufficient. If those are hard to
find, SuseLinux11 is a free alternative.

These are some scores with MiniBench (Courtesy of System7Today) of different machines,
MacOS was 7.1 for Basilisk and 7.6 for SheepShaver.

MiniBench scores:

Pentium3/650: 13

Atom N270: 26

Intel E2180: 60

AMD X2 64 5000+: 70 

In 2008 I compared various builds of Basilisk II and SoftMac using real world tests. Those results are here.