Unfortunately no change.

Well, I think I'm fine with transparency turned on now. So, if it's only me, who's having trouble here, don't worry. Don't want to arouse too many sheeps. But nevertheless, I'm happy to stay for testing, if you want to iron that out.

Thanks for this update. Tried the new version. Unfortunately no change here. But I could nail it down a bit further: Beach ball only occurs with an external retina display (28" Samsung). On the internal display everything works fine, no matter which GPU is used, with and without transparencies....

Got it!!! And it's an interesting point: In the accessibility settings I had enabled reduced transparency. As soon as I untick that, Sheepshaver runs. I can reproduce this on my test account. So it seems to be related to graphics driver stuff. (I have a MacBook Pro with a Radeon Pro 450.)

Anyway, thank you for your help so far, though. Much appreciated. I'm not aware of anything that makes my account unique. Would Sheepshaver run in safe boot mode (pressing SHIFT at boot)?

Yes. Just saved a TextEdit file in my home folder.

Yes. Tried "xattr -cr" and no success. But interesting observation: I created another user "test" in Catalina and could successfully use Sheepshaver on its desktop. So I put this whole Sheepshaver folder from the desktop into the shared user folder. From the new test user I still...

Still no success.

I get a beach ball. I did it exactly as you wrote. Made a folder on the desktop, moved the application in there and also ROM, dsk, iso. The prefs file was not created. Running it via sudo from there shows the vm instantly. Double clicking shows the beach ball.

Thanks for your answers. Home folder permissions are okay. I already tried Full Disk Access, but doesn't change anything. It was my first idea, too. On the second Mac access settings also where not set and it worked there. Must be something different. There's also no antivirus or application firewal...

After hours of searching and hacking around in terminal I am at loss. I downloaded the latest build of Sheepshaver, unzipped it, placed a valid ROM beside and no matter what I do, it hangs on double clicking. Obviously it seems to be an access problem, because when I start it from terminal with sudo...