Running CodeWarrior for Playstation Net Yaroze via SheepShaver

The Net Yaroze was a special version of the original Sony Playstation that let consumers write their own games. To prevent Net Yaroze games from competing with official Playstation releases created by licensed companies with professional development kits, a Net Yaroze game couldn't access the CD drive, and it could usually only be played by people who had a Net Yaroze system. (Occasionally, Sony would put Net Yaroze games on demo CDs that came with magazines).

I bought a Net Yaroze system from eBay over decade ago, and in that time have been looking for students that would be interested in experimenting with it, with no success. Now, a decade later, I finally found some students on my Retrofuturistic Hardware Vertically Integrated Project (VIP) team interested in taking it on. Before handing it off, I thought I'd take a crack at getting the development environment running.

My Net Yaroze came with a CD labeled "Metrowerks Codewarrior for Net Yaroze," containing both Windows and Mac versions. I can't seem to find that particular CD at the moment, but I believe it corresponds to this disk image. It came out in 1996, which puts in in the zone of Windows 95 and Classic Mac OS System 7. As expected, the installer programs didn't seem to want run on my Windows 10 desktop machine from 2014 or my Mac OS X laptop from 2015.

SheepShaver emulates PowerPC-based Macintoshes. I presumed that Mac software that works on System 7 will likely work on System 9, so I installed System 9. This video by AlexElectronics was particularly helpful in getting SheepShaver up and running. I went with the "New World PPC ROM" and the "Mac OS 9 Boot Image" available from this page by Redundant Robot.

Click on the images to see the full-size screenshots. We're up and running:

Let's first install Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is conveniently available on the install CD:

Now let's run the installer!

OK, let's run CodeWarrior:

Let's try to compile this Hello World program:

We got some errors, but I'll save looking into those for another day.

At this point, I noticed there were folders on the CD labeled "Unsupported Software" and "Misc Goodies" that weren't copied over as part of the installation procedure, so I copied those over manually.

I didn't have the Net Yaroze on me at the time of doing these experiments, but I thought it would be fun to try running PSComUtil, the app that connects to the Net Yaroze.

Unsurprisingly, I got some errors.

Net Yaroze connects to its host computer via a DB9 RS232 serial port, so to even try to connect my 2015 MacBook Pro would require a USB-to-RS232 adapter. I'm also not sure too what extent SheepShaver supports serial communication through such an adapter.