Page 1 of 1

Hints please: Sheepshaver quits/freezes on launching Civ II

Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2020 12:53 am
by Alex
i installed Sheepshaver a month or so back to run some old games.

Sheepshaver v2.5, MacOS 9.04Z; MacOS X 10.13.6, iMac (27-inch, Late 2009), 16GB RAM.

Until today, everything worked okay - Sheepshaver would sometimes fail to start up for one reason or another, but a second attempt usually worked.

But starting from a few hours ago, trying to launch Civilization II (installed from a copy of the CD I bought many years ago) resulted in Sheepshaver either freezing or quitting.

I tried trashing various suspicious looking prefs files, but to no avail. In the end, I scrapped my Sheepshaver MacOS 9 boot disc image file, and set up a new boot disc, re-installing MacOS 9 from scratch. I then re-installed Civilization II from the installer.

But Civilization II still won't run - if I try to launch it, Sheepshaver once again either freezes or quits. This is quite strange, because Civilization II has run quite happily here on Sheepshaver up until a few hours ago. The only thing I can think of that's changed recently is that I installed the latest Adobe Flash update for MacOS X, but I can't see that that would have any effect on Sheepshaver.

I'd appreciate any troubleshooting hints anyone might have.

Re: Hints please: Sheepshaver quits/freezes on launching Civ

Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2020 8:22 am
by Ronald P. Regensburg
Did you delete the prefs and nvram files before setting up SheepShaver again? You can use the scripts that are included in the SheepShaver folder download.

Re: Hints please: Sheepshaver quits/freezes on launching Civ

Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2020 4:52 pm
by Alex
Thanks for the tip. No, I didn't try deleting the prefs or zapping NVAM.

Unfortunately, the SheepShaver scripts folder I have contains PowerPC applications, and my iMac is Intel so they don't run.

Am I right in thinking that the scripts in question delete the files:

~/.sheepshaver_nvram
~/.sheepshaver_prefs

- if so, I can delete those manually.

Thanks once more.

Re: Hints please: Sheepshaver quits/freezes on launching Civ

Posted: Mon Mar 23, 2020 8:09 pm
by Ronald P. Regensburg
I do not know how you got the older scripts. In the SheepShaver for Mac OS X (and OSX and macOS) download topic, you are informed that for a new SheepShaver 2.5 setup you should also download the SheepShaver folder. That folder contains the scripts for Intel 32 plus 64 bit.

But indeed, these scripts will delete the two files you mention.